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— 11 1 1 11 





BOARDING THE GUN-BOATS. [page 73 , 




STRANGE STORIES FROM HISTORY 

FOR 

YOUNG PEOPLE 



BY 



GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON 

u 

AUTHOR OP 


“red eagle” “the big brother” “the wreck of the red bird” 
“the signal boys” etc. 


J 







Sllustrateto 



NEW YORK 

BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1886 




'U< 


HARPER & 


\ 


r S' 


HARPER’S YOUNG PEOPLE SERIES. 


Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, $1.00 per volume. 


THE ADVENTURES OF JIMMY BROWN. Edited by W. L. Alden. 

THE CRUISE OF THE CANOE CLUB. By W. L. ALDEN. 

THE CRUISE OF THE “GHOST.” By W. L. Alden. 

THE MORAL PIRATES. By W. L. ALDEN. 

TOBY TYLER; or, TEN WEEKS WITH A CIRCUS. By JAMES OTIS. 

MR. STUBBS’S BROTHER. A Sequel to “Toby Tyler.” By James Otis. 

TIM AND TIP; OR, THE ADVENTURES OF A BOY AND A DOG. By JAMES OTIS. 
LEFT BEHIND; or, TEN DAYS A NEWSBOY. By JAMES OTIS. 

RAISING THE “PEARL.” By James Otis. 

MILDRED’S BARGAIN, AND OTHER STORIES. By LUCY C. LILLIE. 

NAN. By Lucy C. Lillie. 

THE FOUR MACNICOLS. By WILLIAM BLACK. 

THE LOST CITY ; or, THE BOY EXPLORERS IN CENTRAL ASIA. By David Ker. 
THE TALKING LEAVES. An Indian Story. By W. O. STODDARD. 

WHO WAS PAUL GRAYSON ? By JOHN Habberton, Author of “ Helen’s Babies.” 
PRINCE LAZYBONES, AND OTHER STORIES. By Mrs. W. J. Hays. 

THE ICE QUEEN. By Ernest Ingersoll. 

CHAPTERS ON PLANT LIFE. By Mrs. S. B. Herrick. 

STRANGE STORIES FROM HISTORY. By George Cary Eggleston. 


Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

PT Any of the above works will be sent by mail , postage prepaid , to any part of the 
United States or Canada , on receipt of the price . 









Copyright, 1885, by Harper & Brothers. 



PREFACE. 


In calling the tales in this volume “ Strange Sto- 
ries ” I have sought simply to indicate that, in the 
main, they are unfamiliar to youthful readers, and 
that most of them relate deeds and occurrences some 
what out of the common. In choosing the themes I 
have tried to avoid the tales that have been often 
used, and to tell only those of which young readers 
generally have not before heard. 

Of course, a book of this kind can make no preten- 
sion to originality of matter, as the facts used in it 
are to be found in historical works of recognized au- 
thority, though many of them have been drawn from 
books that are not easily accessible to the majority 
of readers. If there is any originality in my little 


vi Preface. 

volume it is in the manner in which the tales are 
told. I have endeavored to tell them as simply as 
possible, and at the same time with as much dramat- 
ic force and fervor as I could command, while adher- 
ing rigidly to the facts of history. 

It would be impossible for me to say to what 
sources I am indebted for materials. The incidents 
related have been familiar to me for years, as they 
are to all persons whose reading of history has been 
at all extensive, and I cannot say with any certainty 
how much of each I learned from one and how much 
from another historical writer. Nor is it in any way 
necessary that I should do so, as the recorded facts 
of history are common property. But a special ac- 
knowledgment is due to Mr. James Parton in the 
case of the tale of the Negro Fort, and also for cer- 
tain details in those relating to the New Orleans 
campaign of 1814-15. In .that field Mr. Parton is an 
original investigator, to whose labors every writer on 
the subject must be indebted. I wish also to ac- 


Vll 


Preface . 

knowledge my obligation to Mr. A. B. Meek, the au- 
thor of a little work entitled “ Romantic Passages in 
Southwestern History,” for the main facts in the sto- 
ries of the Charge of the Hounds and the Battle of 
the Canoes on the Alabama River ; but, with respect 
to those matters, I have had the advantage of private 
sources of information also. 

Most of the stories in the volume were originally 
written for Harper's Young People ; one was first 
published in Good Cheer , and a few in other periodi- 
cals. I owe thanks to the editors and publishers 
concerned for permission to reprint them in this 
form. 





CONTENTS. 


HISTORY STORIES. 

PAGE 

The Story of the Negro Fort 13 

A War for an Archbishop 26 

The Boy Commander of the Camisards 38 

The Canoe Fight 55 

The Battle of Lake Borgne 67 

The Battle in the Dark 77 

The Troublesome Burghers 88 

The Defence of Rochelle 99 

The Sad Story of a Boy King Ill 

Two Obscure Heroes 120 

The Charge of the Hounds 


130 


X 


Contents . 


PAGE 


The Story of a Winter Campaign ........ 140 

Young Washington in the Woods 151 

The Story of Catherine 163 

The Virginia Wife-Market 175 


BIOGRAPHY STORIES. 

Boyhood of Daniel Webster 185 

The Scullion who Became a Sculptor 193 

Boyhood of William Chambers 200 

How a Boy Hired Out, and What Came of It. . . . 206 

The Wickedest Man in the World 212 

A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead 228 


ILLUSTRATIONS. 


PAGE 

Boarding the Gun-boats .... Frontispiece 

Breakfast and Battle 23 

Vladimir Besieging the City Containing his Archbishop. . . . 35 

Cavalier Personating the Lieutenant of the Count Broglio . . 47 

With a Single Blow he Knocked over the Indian with whom 

Austill was Struggling 63 

General Jackson at New Orleans 79 

The Burghers Prepare to Defend their City 95 

Richelieu Surveying the Works at Rochelle 103 

The Parting between King Richard II. and Queen Isabella . 117 
Martin Preaching to the People on the Duty of Fighting . .125 

“ Just at the Moment when Matters were at their Worst , he 

Rode up 137 

Capture of the Dutch Fleet by the Soldiers of the French Re- 
public 149 

Washington as a Surveyor 157 

“ She Went Boldly into his Tent 1 '. 171 

“ ‘ To the End of the Twelfth Book of the JEneid ' answered 
the 1 Idle ' Boy in Triumph ” ,189 




















































« 

















STRANGE STORIES FROM HISTORY. 


THE STORY OF THE NEGRO FORT. 

During the war of 1812-14, between Great Brit- 
ain and the United States, the weak Spanish Gover- 
nor of Florida — for Florida was then Spanish terri- 
tory — permitted the British to make Pensacola their 
base of operations against us. This was a gross out- 
rage, as we were at peace with Spain at the time, and 
General Jackson, acting on his own responsibility, 
invaded Florida in retaliation. 

Among the British at that time was an eccentric 
Irish officer, Colonel Edward Nichols, who enlisted 
and tried to make soldiers of a large number of the 
Seminole Indians. In 1815, after the war was over, 
Colonel Nichols again visited the Seminoles, who 


14 Strange Stories from History . 

were disposed to be hostile to the United States, as 
Colonel Nichols himself was, and made an astonish- 
ing treaty with them, in which an alliance, offensive 
and defensive, between Great Britain and the Semi- 
noles, was agreed upon. We had made peace with 
Great Britain a few months before, and yet this ri- 
diculous Irish colonel signed a treaty binding Great 
Britain to fight us whenever the Seminoles in the 
Spanish territory of Florida should see fit to make 
a war ! If this extraordinary performance had been 
all, it would not have mattered so much, for the 
British government refused to ratify the treaty ; but 
it was not all. Colonel Nichols, as if determined to 
give us as much trouble as he could, built a strong 
fortress on the Appalachicola Biver, and gave it to 
his friends the Seminoles, naming it “The British 
Post on the Appalachicola,” where the British had 
not the least right to have any post whatever. Situ- 
ated on a high bluff, with flanks securely guarded by 
the river on one side and a swamp on the other, this 
fort, properly defended, was capable of resisting the 


The Story of the Negro Fort . 1 5 

assaults of almost any force that could approach it; 
and Colonel Nichols was determined that it should 
be properly defended, and should be a constant men- 
ace and source of danger to the United States. He 
armed it with one 32 -pounder cannon, three 24- 
pounders, and eight other guns. In the matter of 
small-arms he was even more liberal. He supplied 
the fort with 2500 muskets, 500 carbines, 400 pistols, 
and 500 swords. In the magazines he stored 300 
quarter casks of rifle powder and 763 barrels of or- 
dinary gunpowder. 

When Colonel Nichols went away, his Seminoles 
soon wandered off, leaving the fort without a garri- 
son. This gave an opportunity to a negro bandit 
and desperado named Gargon to seize the place, 
which he did, gathering about him a large band of 
runaway negroes, Choctaw Indians, and other lawless 
persons, whom he organized into a strong company 
of robbers. Gargon made the fort his stronghold, 
and began to plunder the : > uiitry round about as 
thoroughly as any robber baron or Italian bandit 


1 6 Strange Stories from History . 

ever did, sometimes venturing across the border into 
the United States. 

All this was so annoying and so threatening to our 
frontier settlements in Georgia, that General Jackson 
demanded of the Spanish authorities that they should 
reduce the place; and they would have been glad 
enough to do so, probably, if it had been possible, 
because the banditti plundered Spanish as well as 
other settlements. But the Spanish governor had 
no force at command, and could do nothing, and so 
the fort remained, a standing menace to the Ameri- 
can borders. 

Matters were in this position in the spring of 1816, 
when General Gaines was sent to fortify our frontier 
at the point where the Chattahoochee and Flint riv- 
ers unite to form the Appalachicola. In June of that 
year some stores for General Gaines’s forces were sent 
by sea from New Orleans. The vessels carrying 
them were to go up the Appalachicola, and General 
Gaines was not sure that the little fleet would be 
permitted to pass the robbers 1 stronghold, which had 


i7 


The Story of the Negro Fort . 

come to be called the Negro Fort. Accordingly, he 
sent Colonel Clinch with a small force down the riv- 
er, to render any assistance that might be necessary. 
On the way Colonel Clinch was joined by a band of 
Seminoles, who wanted to recapture the fort on their 
own account, and the two bodies determined to act 
together. 

Meantime the two schooners with supplies and the 
two gun-boats sent to guard them had arrived at the 
mouth of the river ; and when the commandant tried 
to hold a conference with Gargon, the ship’s boat, 
bearing a white flag, was fired upon. 

Running short of water while lying off the river’s 
mouth, the officers of the fleet sent out a boat to pro- 
cure a supply. This boat was armed with a swivel 
and muskets, and was commanded by Midshipman 
Luffborough. The boat went into the mouth of 
the river, and, seeing a negro on shore, Midshipman 
Luffborough landed to ask for fresh-water supplies. 
Gargon, with some of his men, lay in ambush at the 
spot, and while the officer talked with the negro the 


1 8 Strange Stories from History . 

concealed men fired upon the boat, killing Luffbor- 
ough and two of his men. One man got away by 
swimming, and was picked up by the fleet ; two oth- 
ers were taken prisoners, and, as was afterwards 
learned, Gargon coated them with tar and burned 
them to death. 

It would not do to send more boats ashore, and so 
the little squadron lay together awaiting orders from 
Colonel Clinch. That officer, as he approached the 
fort, captured a negro, who wore a white man’s scalp 
at his belt, and from him he learned of the massacre 
of Luff borough’s party. There was no further occa- 
3ion for doubt as to what was to be done. Colonel 
Clinch determined to reduce the fort at any cost, al- 
though the operation promised to be a very difficult 
one. 

Placing his men in line of battle, he sent a courier 
to the fleet, ordering the gun-boats to come up and 
help in the attack. The Seminoles made many dem- 
onstrations against the works, and the negroes replied 
with their cannon. Gargon had raised his flags — a 


19 


The Story of the Negro Fort . 

red one and a British Union-jack — and whenever he 
caught sight of the Indians or the Americans, he 
shelled them vigorously with his 32-pounder. 

Three or four days were passed in this way, while 
the gun-boats were slowly making their way up the 
river. It was Colonel Clinch’s purpose to have the 
gun-boats shell the fort, while he should storm it on 
the land side. The work promised to be bloody, 
and it was necessary to bring all the available force 
to bear at once. There were no siege-guns at hand, 
or anywhere within reach, and the only way to re- 
duce the fort was for the small force of soldiers — 
numbering only one hundred and sixteen men — to 
rush upon it, receiving the fire of its heavy artillery, 
and climb over its parapets in the face of a murder- 
ous fire of small-arms. Gargon had with him three 
hundred and thirty-four men, so that, besides having 
strong defensive works and an abundant supply of 
large cannon, his force outnumbered Colonel Clinch’s 
nearly three to one. It is true that the American offi- 
cer had the band of Seminoles with him, but they were 
2 


20 Strange Stogies from History. 

entirely worthless for determined work of the kind 
that the white men had to do. Even while lying in 
the woods at a distance, waiting for the gun-boats to 
come up, the Indians became utterly demoralized 
under the fire of Garmon’s 32-pounder. There was 
nothing to be done, however, by way of improving 
the prospect, which was certainly hopeless enough. 
One hundred and sixteen white men had the Negro 
Fort to storm, notwithstanding its strength and the 
overwhelming force that defended it. But those one 
hundred and sixteen men were American soldiers, 
under command of a brave and resolute officer, who 
had made up his mind that the fort could be taken, 
and they were prepared to follow their leader up to 
the muzzle of the guns and over the ramparts, there 
to fight the question out in a hand-to-hand struggle 
with the desperadoes inside. 

Finally the gun -boats arrived, and preparations 
were made for the attack. Sailing-master Jairus Loo- 
mis, the commandant of the little fleet, cast his an- 
chors under the guns of the Negro Fort at five o’clock 


21 


The Story of the Negro Fort . 

in the morning on the 27th of July, 1816. The fort 
at once opened fire, and it seemed impossible for the 
little vessels to endure the storm of shot and shell 
that rained upon them from the ramparts above. 
They replied vigorously, however, but with no ef- 
fect. Their guns were too small to make any im- 
pression upon the heavy earthen walls of the for- 
tress. 

Sailing-master Loomis had roused his ship’s cook 
early that morning, and had given him a strange 
breakfast to cook. He had ordered him to make all 
the fire he could in his galley, and to fill the fire with 
cannon-balls. Not long after the bombardment began 
the cook reported that breakfast was ready ; that is 
to say, that the cannon-balls were red-hot. Loomis 
trained one of his guns with his own hands so that 
its shot should fall within the fort, instead of burying 
itself in the ramparts, and this gun was at once load- 
ed with a red-hot shot. The word was given, the 
match applied, and the glowing missile sped on its 
way. A few seconds later the earth shook and 


22 Strange Stories from History . 

quivered, a deafening roar stunned the sailors, and 
a vast cloud of smoke filled the air, shutting out 
the sun. 

The hot shot had fallen into the great magazine, 
where there were hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, 
and the Negro Fort was no more. It had been lit- 
erally blown to atoms in a second. 

The slaughter was frightful. There were, as we 
know already, three hundred and thirty-four men in 
the fort, and two hundred and seventy of them were 
killed outright by the explosion. All the rest, ex- 
cept three men who miraculously escaped injury, 
were wounded, most of them so badly that they died 
soon afterwards. 

One of the three men who escaped the explosion un- 
hurt was Grargon himself. Bad as this bandit chief was, 
Colonel Clinch would have spared his life, but it hap- 
pened that he fell into the hands of the sailors from 
the gun-boat; and when they learned that Gargon 
had tarred and burned their comrades whom he had 
captured in the attack on Luffborough’s boat, they 


BREAKFAST ANB BATTLE 







/ 





The Story of the Negro Fort. 25 

turned him over to the infuriated Seminoles, who put 
him to death in their own cruel way. 

This is the history of a strange affair, which at one 
time promised to give the government of the United 
States no little trouble, even threatening to involve 
us in a war with Spain, for the fort was on Spanish 
territory, and the Spaniards naturally resented an in- 
vasion of their soil. 


A WAR FOR AN ARCHBISHOP. 

THE CURIOUS STORY OF VLADIMIR THE GREAT. 

In the latter part of the tenth century Sviatozlaf 
was Grand Prince of Russia. He was a powerful 
prince, but a turbulent one, and he behaved so ill 
towards his neighbors that, when an opportunity of- 
fered, one of them converted his skull into a gold- 
mounted drinking -cup, with an inscription upon it, 
and his dominions were parcelled out between his 
three sons — Yaropolk, Oleg, and Vladimir. 

Yaropolk, finding his possessions too small for his 
ambition, made war on Oleg, and conquered his ter- 
ritory; but his brother Oleg having been killed in 
the war, the tender-hearted Yaropolk wept bitterly 
over his corpse. 

The other brother, Vladimir, was so grieved at the 
death of Oleg that he abandoned his capital, Novgo- 


27 


A War for an Archbishop . 

rod, and remained for a time in seclusion. Yaropolk 
seized the opportunity thus offered, and made him- 
self master of Vladimir’s dominions also. Not long af- 
terwards Vladimir appeared at the head of an army, 
and Yaropolk ran away to his own capital, Kiev. 
Vladimir at once resumed the throne, and sent word 
to Yaropolk that he would in due time return the 
hostile visit. 

About this time Yaropolk and Vladimir both 
asked for the hand of the Princess Rogneda, of Po- 
lotzk, in marriage; and the father of the princess, 
fearing to offend either of the royal barbarians, left 
the choice to Rogneda herself. She chose Yaropolk, 
sending a very insulting message to Vladimir, where- 
upon that prince marched against Polotzk, conquered 
the province, and w 7 ith his own hand slew the father 
and brothers of the princess. Then, with their blood 
still unwashed from his hands, he forced Rogneda to 
marry him. 

Having attended to this matter, Vladimir under- 
took to return his brother’s hostile visit, as he had 


28 Strange Stories from History. 

promised to do. Yaropolk’s capital, Kiev, was a 
strongly fortified place, and capable of a stout resist- 
ance; but Vladimir corrupted Blude, one of Yaro- 
polk’s ministers, paying him to betray his master, 
and promising, in the event of success, to heap hon- 
ors on his head. Blude worked upon Yaropolk’s 
fears, and persuaded him to abandon the capital 
without a struggle, and Vladimir took possession of 
the throne and the country. Even in his exile, how- 
ever, Yaropolk had no peace. Blude frightened him 
with false stories, and persuaded him to remove from 
place to place, until his mind and body were worn 
out, when, at Blude’s suggestion, he determined to 
surrender himself, and trust to the mercy of Vladimir. 
That good-natured brother ordered the betrayed and 
distressed prince to be put to death. 

Then Vladimir rewarded Blude. He entertained 
him in princely fashion, declaring to his followers 
that he was deeply indebted to this man for his 
faithful services, and heaping all manner of honors 
upon him. But at the end of three days he said to 


29 


A War for an Archbishop. 

Blude: “I have kept my promise strictly. I have 
received you with welcome, and heaped unwonted 
honors upon your head. This I have done as your 
friend. To-day, as judge, I condemn the traitor and 
the murderer of his prince.” He ordered that Blude 
should suffer instant death, and the sentence was 
executed. 

Now that both Oleg and Yaropolk were dead, 
Vladimir was Grand Prince of all the Russias, as his 
father before him had been. He invaded Poland, 
and made war upon various others of his neighbors, 
greatly enlarging his dominions and strengthening 
his rule. 

But Vladimir was a very pious prince in his hea- 
then way, and feeling that the gods had greatly fa- 
vored him, he made rich feasts of thanksgiving in 
their honor. He ordered splendid memorials to vari- 
ous deities to be erected throughout the country, and 
he specially honored Perune, the father of the gods, 
for whom he provided a new pair of golden whiskers 
— golden whiskers being the special glory of Perune. 


30 Strange Stories from History . 

Not content with this, Vladimir ordered a human 
sacrifice to be made, and selected for the victim a 
Christian youth of the capital. The father of the 
boy resisted, and both were slain, locked in each oth- 
er’s arms. 

Vladimir gave vast sums of money to the religious 
establishments, and behaved generally like a very 
devout pagan. His piety and generosity made him 
so desirable a patron that efforts were made by the 
priests of other religions to convert him. Jews, Mo- 
hammedans, Catholics, and Greeks all sought to win 
him, and Vladimir began seriously to consider the 
question of changing his religion. He appointed a 
commission, consisting of ten boyards, and ordered 
them to examine into the comparative merits of the 
different religions, and to report to him. When their re- 
port was made, Vladimir weighed the matter carefully. 

He began by rejecting Mohammedanism, because 
it forbids the use of wine, and Vladimir was not at 
all disposed to become a water-drinker. Judaism, he 
said, was a homeless religion, its followers being wan- 


A War for an Archbishop . 31 

derers on the face of the earth, under a curse; so 
he would have nothing to do with that faith. The 
Catholic religion would not do at all, because it rec- 
ognized in the pope a superior to himself, and Vladi- 
mir had no mind to acknowledge a superior. The 
Greek religion was free from these objections, and, 
moreover, by adopting it he would bring himself into 
friendship with the great Greek or Byzantine Em- 
pire, whose capital was at Constantinople, and that was 
something which he earnestly desired to accomplish. 

Accordingly, he determined to become a Christian 
and a member of the Greek Church; but how? 
There were serious difficulties in the way. In order 
to become a Christian he must be baptized, and he was 
puzzled about how to accomplish that. There were 
many Greek priests in his capital, any one of whom 
would have been glad to baptize the heathen mon- 
arch, but Vladimir would not let a mere priest con- 
vert him into a Christian. Nobody less than an arch- 
bishop would do for that, and there was no archbish- 
op in Russia. 


32 Strange Stories from History. 

It is true that there were plenty of archbishops in 
the dominions of his Byzantine neighbors, and that 
the Greek emperors, Basil and Constantine, would 
have been glad to send him a dozen of them if he 
had expressed a wish to that effect; but Vladimir 
was proud, and could not think of asking a favor of 
anybody, least of all of the Greek emperors. No, he 
would die a heathen rather than ask for an archbish- 
op to baptize him. 

Nevertheless, Vladimir had fully made up his mind 
to have himself baptized by an archbishop. It was 
his lifelong habit, when he wanted anything, to take 
it by force. He had taken two thirds of his domin- 
ions in that way, and, as we have seen, it was in that 
way that he got his wife Bogneda. So now that he 
wanted an archbishop, he determined to take one. 
Calling his army together, he declared war on the 
Greek emperors, and promising his soldiers all the 
pillage they wanted, he marched away towards Con- 
stantinople. 

The first serious obstacle he met with was the for- 


33 


A War for an Archbishop. 

tified city of Kherson, situated near the spot where 
Sebastopol stands in our day. Here the resistance 
was so obstinate that month after month was con- 
sumed in siege operations. At the end of six months 
Vladimir became seriously alarmed lest the garrison 
should be succored from without, in which case his 
hope of getting himself converted into a Christian 
must be abandoned altogether. 

While he was troubled on this score, however, one 
of his soldiers picked up an arrow that had been shot 
from the city, and found a letter attached to it. This 
letter informed the Grand Prince that the water-pipes 
of the city received their supplies at a point immedi- 
ately in his rear, and with this news Vladimir’s hope 
of becoming a Christian revived. He found the wa- 
ter-pipes and stopped them up, and the city surren- 
dered. 

There were plenty of bishops and archbishops 
there, of course, and they were perfectly willing — as 
they had been from the first, for that matter — to bap- 
tize the unruly royal convert, but Vladimir was not 


34 Strange Stories from History . 

content now with that. He sent a messenge-r to Con- 
stantinople to tell the emperors there that he wanted 
their sister, the Princess Anne, for a wife ; and that if 
they refused, he would march against Constantinople 
itself. The Emperors Basil and Constantine consent- 
ed, and although Vladimir had five wives already, he 
married Anne, and was baptized on the same day. 

Having now become a Christian, the Grand Prince 
determined that his Russians should do the same. 
He publicly stripped the god Perune of his gorgeous 
golden whiskers, and of his rich vestments, showing 
the people that Perune was only a log of wood. 
Then he had the deposed god whipped in public, and 
thrown into the river, with all the other gods. 

He next ordered all the people of his capital city to 
assemble on the banks of the Dnieper River, and, at 
a signal, made them all rush into the water, while 
a priest pronounced the baptismal service over the 
whole population of the city at once. It was the 
most wholesale baptism ever performed. 

That is the way in which Russia was changed from 


vlaol >R besieging TnE city containing his AiicnBisiiop. 




37 


A War for an Archbishop. 

a pagan to a Christian empire. The story reads like 
a romance, but it is plain, well-authenticated history. 
For his military exploits the Russian historians call 
this prince Vladimir the Great. The people call him 
St. Vladimir, the Greek Church having enrolled his 
name among the saints soon after his death. He was 
undoubtedly a man of rare military skill, and unusu- 
al ability in the government of men. Bad as his acts 
were, he seems to have had a conscience, and to have 
done his duty so far as he was capable of understand- 
ing it. 


THE BOY COMMANDER OF THE CAMISARDS. 


When Louis XIV. was King of France, that coun- 
try was generally Catholic, as it is still, but in the 
rugged mountain region called the Cevennes more 
than half the people were Protestants. At first the 
king consented that these Protestant people, who 
were well behaved both in peace and in war, should 
live in quiet, and worship as they pleased ; but in 
those days men were not tolerant in matters of relig- 
ion, as they are now, and so after a while King Louis 
made up his mind that he would compel all his peo- 
ple to believe alike. The Protestants of the Cevennes 
were required to give up their religion and to be- 
come Catholics. When they refused, soldiers were 
sent to compel them, and great cruelties were prac- 
tised upon them. Many of them were killed, many 
put in prison, and many sent to work in. the galleys. 


The Boy Commander of the Camisards . 39 

When this persecution had lasted for nearly thirty 
years, a body of young men who were gathered to- 
gether in the High Cevennes resolved to defend them- 
selves by force. They secured arms, and although 
their numbers were very small, they met and fought 
the troops. 

Among these young men was one, a mere boy, 
named Jean Cavalier. His home was in the Lower 
Cevennes, but he had fled to the highlands for safety. 
This boy, without knowing it, had military genius 
of a very high order, and when it became evident 
that he and his comrades could not long hold out 
against the large bodies of regular troops sent against 
them, he suggested a plan which in the end proved 
to be so good that for years the poor peasants were 
able to maintain war against all the armies that King 
Louis could send against them, although he sent 
many of his finest generals and as many as sixty 
thousand men to subdue them. 

Cavalier’s plan was to collect more men, divide, and 

make uprisings in several places at once, so that the 
3 


40 Strange Stories from History. 

king’s officers could not tell in which way to turn. 
As he and his comrades knew the country well, and 
had friends to tell them of the enemy’s movements, 
they could nearly always know when it was safe to 
attack, and when they must hide in the woods. 

Cavalier took thirty men and went into one part 
of the country, while Captain La Porte, with a like 
number, went to another, and Captain St. John to 
still another. They kept each other informed of all 
movements, and whenever one was pressed by the 
enemy, the others would begin burning churches or 
attacking small garrisons. The enemy would thus be 
compelled to abandon the pursuit of one party in order 
to go after the others, and it soon became evident that 
under Cavalier’s lead the peasants were too wily and 
too strong for the soldiers. Sometimes Cavalier would 
fairly beat detachments of his foes, and give them 
chase, killing all whom he caught ; for in that war 
both sides did this, even killing their prisoners with- 
out mercy. At other times Cavalier was worsted in 
fight, and when that was the case he fled to the 


The Boy Commander of the Camisards. 4 1 

woods, collected more men, and waited for another 
chance. 

Without trying to write an orderly history of the 
war, for which there is not space enough here, I shall 
now tell some stories of Cavalier’s adventures, draw- 
ing the information chiefly from a book which he 
himself wrote years afterwards, when he was a cele- 
brated man and a general in the British army. 

One Sunday Cavalier, who was a preacher as well 
as a soldier, held services in his camp in the woods, 
and all the Protestant peasants in the neighborhood 
attended. The Governor of Alais, whose name was 
De la Hay, thought this a good opportunity not only 
to defeat Cavalier’s small force, but also to catch the 
Protestant women and children in the act of attend- 
ing a Protestant service, the punishment for which 
was death. He collected a force of about six hun- 
dred men, cavalry and infantry, and marched towards 
the wood, where he knew he should outnumber the 
peasants three or four to one. He had a mule loaded 
with ropes, declaring that he was going to hang all 
the rebels at once. 


42 


Strange Stories from History . 


When news of De la Hay’s coming was brought to 
the peasants, they sent away all the country people, 
women, and children, and began to discuss the situa- 
tion. They had no commander, for although Cava- 
lier had led them generally, he had no authority to 
do so. Everything was voluntary, and everything a 
subject of debate. On this occasion many thought it 
best to retreat at once, as there were less than two 
hundred of them; but Cavalier declared that if they 
would follow him, he would lead them to a place 
where victory might be won. They consented, and 
he advanced to a point on the road where he could 
shelter his men. Quickly disposing them in line of 
battle behind some defences, he awaited the coming 
of the enemy. 

De la Hay, being over-confident because of his su- 
perior numbers, blundered at the outset. Instead of 
attacking first with his infantry, he placed his horse- 
men in front, and ordered an assault. Cavalier was 
quick to take advantage of this blunder. He ordered 
only a few of his men to fire, and this drew a volley 


The Boy Commander of the Camisards. 43 

from the advancing horsemen, which did little dam- 
age to the sheltered troops, but emptied the horse- 
men’s weapons. Instantly Cavalier ordered a charge 
and a volley, and the horsemen, with empty pistols, 
gave way, Cavalier pursuing them. De la Hay’s in- 
fantry, being just behind the horsemen, were ridden 
down by their own friends, and became confused and 
panic-stricken. Cavalier pursued hotly, his men 
throwing off their coats to lighten themselves, and 
giving the enemy no time to rally. A reinforcement 
two hundred strong, coming up, tried to check Cava- 
lier’s charge; but so impetuous was the onset that 
these fresh troops gave way in their turn, and the 
chase ended only when the king’s men had shut 
themselves up in the fortified towns. Cavalier had 
lost only five or six men, the enemy losing a hundred 
killed and many more wounded. Cavalier captured 
a large quantity of arms and ammunition, of which 
he was in sore need. 

When the battle was over it was decided unani- 
mously to make Cavalier the commander. He re- 


44 Strange Stories from History. 

fused, however, to accept the responsibility unless it 
could be accompanied with power to enforce obedi- 
ence, and his troops at once voted to make his au- 
thority absolute, even to the decision of questions of 
life and death. According to the best authorities, 
Cavalier was only seventeen years old when this ab- 
solute command was conferred upon him. How skil- 
fully he used the scant means at his disposal we shall 
see hereafter. 

On one occasion Cavalier attacked a party of forty 
men who were marching through the country to re- 
inforce a distant post, and killed most of them. 
While searching the dead bodies, he found in the 
pocket of the. commanding officer an order signed by 
Count Broglio, the king’s lieutenant, directing all 
military officers and town authorities to lodge and 
feed the party on their march. No sooner had the 
boy soldier read this paper than he resolved to turn 
it to his own advantage in a daring and dangerous 
way. 

The castle of Servas, near Alais, had long been a 


The Boy Commander of the Camisards. 45 

source of trouble to him. It was a strong place, built 
upon a steep hill, and was so difficult of approach 
that it would have been madness to try to take it by 
force. This castle stood right in the line of Cava- 
lier’s communications with his friends, near a road 
which he was frequently obliged to pass, and its 
presence there was a source of annoyance and danger 
to him. Moreover, its garrison of about forty men 
were constantly plundering and murdering Cavalier’s 
friends in the country round about, and giving timely 
notice to his enemies of his own military movements. 

When he found the order referred to he resolved 
to pretend that he was Count Broglio’s nephew, the 
dead commander of the detachment which he had 
just destroyed. Dressing himself in that officer’s 
clothes, he ordered his men to put on the clothing of 
the other dead royalists. Then he took six of his 
best men, with their own Camisard uniforms on, and 
bound them with ropes, to represent prisoners. One 
of them had been wounded in the arm, and his bloody 
sleeve helped the stratagem. Putting these six men 


46 Strange Stories from History . 

at the head of his troop, with a guard of their dis- 
guised comrades over them, he marched towards the 
Castle of Servas. There he declared himself to be 
Count Broglio’s nephew, and said that he had met a 
company of the Barbets, or Camisards, and had de- 
feated them, taking six prisoners ; that he was afraid 
to keep these prisoners in the village overnight lest 
their friends should rescue them ; and that he wished 
to lodge them in the castle for safety. When the 
governor of the castle heard this story, and saw the 
order of Count Broglio, he was completely imposed 
upon. He ordered the prisoners to be brought into 
the castle, and invited Cavalier to be his guest there 
for the night. Taking two of his officers with him, 
Cavalier went into the castle to sup with the govern- 
or. During supper several of his soldiers, who were 
encamped just outside, went into the castle upon pre- 
tence of getting wine or bread, and when five or six 
of them were in, at a signal from Cavalier, they over- 
powered the sentinels and threw the gates open. The 
rest of the troop .rushed in at once, and before the 


CAVALIER, PERSONATING THE LIEUTENANT OF THE COUNT BROGLIO. 







V 




The Boy Commander of the Camisards . 49 

garrison could seize their arms the boy commander 
was master of the fortress. He put the garrison to 
the sword, and, hastily collecting all the arms, ammu- 
nition, and provisions he could find, set fire to the 
castle and marched away. When the fire reached 
the powder magazine the whole fortress was blown 
to fragments, and a post which had long annoyed and 
endangered the Camisards was no more. 

On another occasion, finding himself short of am- 
munition, Cavalier resolved to take some by force and 
stratagem from the strongly fortified town of Savnes. 
His first care was to send a detachment of forty men 
to a point at some distance, with orders to burn a 
church which had lately been fortified, “ thereby,” he 
says, u to make the inhabitants of Savnes believe we 
were busy in another place.” Then he detached an 
officer and fifty men, and ordered them to disguise 
themselves as country militia in the king’s service, 
and to go into Savnes in that character. With some 
difficulty this officer accomplished his purpose, and 
then Koland and Cavalier marched upon the place. 


50 Strange Stories from History . 

His officer inside the town, when the alarm was given, 
said to the governor, “ Let them come ; you’ll see how 
I’ll receive them.” Anxious for his own safety, the 
governor permitted the supposed officer of militia to 
take charge of the defence, and the armed citizens 
put themselves under his command. He instructed 
the citizens to reserve their fire until he should give 
them orders, and in that way enabled Cavalier to 
approach unharmed. Suddenly the officer, directing 
the aim of his men against the citizens, ordered them 
to throw down their arms upon pain of instant death, 
and they, seeing themselves caught in a trap, obeyed. 
Cavalier marched in without opposition, secured all 
that he could carry away of arms, ammunition, and 
provisions, and retired to the woods. 

Throughout the summer and autumn the boy car- 
ried on his part of the war, nearly always getting the 
better of his enemies by his shrewdness and valor, 
and when that was impossible, eluding them with 
equal shrewdness. During that first campaign he de- 
stroyed many fortified places, won many fights against 


The Boy Commander of the Camisards . 5 1 

superior numbers of regular troops nd killed far more 
soldiers for the enemy than he had 1 \der his own com- 
mand. Failing to conquer him by force or strategy, his 
foes fell back upon the confident hope of starving him 
during the winter, for he must pass the winter in the 
forests, with no bases of supply to draw upon for either 
food or ammunition. But in indulging this hope his 
enemies forgot that the crown and glory of his achieve- 
ments in the field had been his marvellous fertility of 
resource. The very qualities which had made him for- 
midable in fight were his safeguard for the winter, 
tie knew quite as well as they did that he must live 
all winter in the woods surrounded by foes, and, 
knowing the difficulty of doing so, he gave his whole 
mind to the question of how to do it. 

He began during the harvest to make his prepara- 
tions. He explored all the caves in the mountains, 
and selected the most available ones for use as mag- 
azines, taking care to have them in all parts of the 
mountains, so that if cut off from one he could draw 
upon another. In these caves he stored great quan- 


52 Strange Stories from History. 

tities of grain and other provisions, and during the 
winter, whenever he needed meal, some of his men, 
who were millers, would carry grain to some lonely 
country mill and grind it. To prevent this, the 
king’s officers ordered that all the country mills 
should be disabled and rendered unlit for use; but 
before the order could be executed, Cavalier directed 
some of his men, who were skilled machinists, to dis- 
able two or three of the mills by carrying away the 
essential parts of their machinery and storing them 
in his caves. Then, when he wanted meal, his ma- 
chinists had only to replace the machinery in some 
disabled mill, and remove it again after his millers 
had done the necessary grinding. His bakers made 
use of farmers’ ovens to bake bread in, and when the 
king’s soldiers, hearing of this, destroyed the ovens, 
Cavalier sent his masons — for he had all sorts of 
craftsmen in his ranks — to rebuild them. 

Having two powder-makers with him, he collected 
saltpetre, burned willow twigs for charcoal, and made 
all the powder he needed in his caves. Before doing 


The Boy Commander of the Camisards. 5 3 

so he had been obliged to resort to many devices in 
order to get powder, sometimes disguising himself as 
a merchant and going into a town and buying small 
quantities at a time, so that suspicion might not be 
awakened, until he secured enough to fill his port- 
manteau. 

For bullets he melted down the leaden weights of 
windows, and when that source of supply failed he 
melted pewter vessels and used pewter bullets — 
a fact which gave rise to the belief that he used 
poisoned balls. Finally, in a dyer’s establishment, he 
had the good luck to find two great leaden kettles, 
weighing more than seven hundred quintals, which, 
he says, “ I caused immediately to be carried into the 
magazines with as much diligence and care as if they 
had been silver.” 

Chiefly by Cavalier’s tireless energy and wonderful 
military skill, the war was kept up against fearful 
odds for years, and finally the young soldier succeed- 
ed in making a treaty of peace in which perfect lib- 
erty of conscience and worship — which was all he 


54 


Strange Stories from History . 


had been fighting for — was guaranteed to the Protes- 
tants of the Cevennes. His friends rejected this 
treaty, however, and Cavalier soon afterwards went 
to Holland, where he was given command of a regi- 
ment in the English service. His career in arms was 
a brilliant one, so brilliant that the British made him 
a general and governor of the island of Jersey; but 
he nowhere showed greater genius or manifested 
higher soldierly qualities than during the time when 
he was the Boy Commander of the Camisards. 


THE CANOE FIGHT. 

AN INCIDENT OF THE CREEK WAR. 

The smallest naval battle ever fought in the world, 
perhaps, occurred on the Alabama River on the 13th 
of November, 1813, between two canoes, and this is 
the way in which it happened. 

The United States were at war with Great Britain 
at that time, and a war with Spain was also threat- 
ened. The British had stirred up the Indians in the 
Northwest to make war upon the whites, and in 1813 
they persuaded the Creek Indians of Alabama and 
Mississippi to begin a war there. 

The government troops were so busy with the 
British in other quarters of the country that very lit- 
tle could be done for the protection of the white set- 
tlers in the Southwest, and for a good while they 
had to take care of themselves in the best way they 


56 Strange Stories from History . 

could. Leaving their homes, they gathered together 
here and there and built rude stockade forts, in which 
they lived, with all their women and children. All 
the men, including all the boys who were old enough 
to pull a trigger — and frontier boys learn to use a gun 
very early in life — were organized into companies of 
volunteer soldiers. 

At Fort Madison, one of the smallest of the forts, 
there was a very daring frontiersman, named Samuel 
(or Sam) Dale — a man who had lived much with the 
Indians, and was like them in many respects, even in 
his dress and manners. Hearing that the Indians 
were in force on the southeastern bank of the Ala- 
bama River, the people in Fort Madison were greatly 
alarmed, fearing that all the crops in that region — 
which were ripe in the fields — would be destroyed. 
If that should occur, they knew they must starve 
during the coming winter, and so they made up their 
minds to drive the savages away, at least until they 
could gather the corn. 

Captain Dale at once made up a party, consisting 


The Canoe Fight. 


57 


of seventy-two men, all volunteers. With this force 
he set out on the 11th of November, taking Tandy 
Walker, a celebrated scout, for his guide. The col- 
umn marched to the Alabama River, and crossed it 
at a point about twenty miles below the present 
town of Claiborne. 

Once across the river, Dale knew that he was 
among the Indians, and, knowing their ways, he was 
as watchful as if he had been one of them himself. 
He forbade his men to sleep at all during the night 
after crossing the river, and kept them under arms, 
in expectation of an attack. . 

No attack being made, he moved up the river the 
next morning, marching most of the men, but order- 
ing Jerry Austill, with six men, to paddle up in two 
canoes that had been found. This Jerry Austill — 
who afterwards became a merchant in Mobile and a 
state senator — was a boy only nineteen years of age 
at the time, but he had already distinguished him- 
self in the war by his courage. 

At a point called Peggy Bailey’s Bluff, Dale, who 

4 


58 Strange Stories from History . 

was marching with one man several hundreds of 
yards ahead of his men, came upon a party of Indians 
at breakfast. He shot one of them, and the rest ran 
away, leaving their provisions behind them. Secur- 
ing the provisions, Dale marched on for a mile or 
two, but, finding no further trace of Indians, he con- 
cluded that the country on that side of the river was 
now pretty clear of them, and so he set to work to 
cross to the other side, meaning to look for enemies 
there. 

The river at that point is about a quarter of a mile 
wide, and, as there were only two small canoes at 
hand, the work of taking the men across was very 
slow. When all were over except Dale and about a 
dozen others, the little remnant of the force was sud- 
denly attacked. 

The situation was a very dangerous one. With 
the main body of his command on the other side of 
the river, where it could give him no help, Dale had 
to face a large body of Indians with only a dozen men, 
and, as only one canoe remained on his side of the 


59 


The Canoe Fight. 

river, it was impossible for the whole of the little 
party to escape by flight, as the canoe would not hold 
them all. 

Concealing his men in the bushes, behind trees, 
and under the river-bank, he replied to the fire of the 
Indians, and kept them at bay. But it was certain 
that this could not last long. The Indians must soon 
find out from the firing how small the number of 
their adversaries was ; and Dale knew that as soon 
as the discovery was made, they would rush upon 
him, and put the whole party to death. 

He called to the men on the other side of the river 
to come over and help him, but they were panic- 
stricken, probably because they could see, as Dale 
could not, how large a body of Indians was pressing 
their commander. The men on the other bank did, 
indeed, make one or two slight attempts to cross, but 
these came to nothing, and the little party on the 
eastern shore seemed doomed to destruction. 

Bad as matters were with Dale, they soon became 
worse. An immense canoe, more than thirty feet 


6o Strange Stories from History. 

long and four feet deep, came down the river, bearing 
eleven warriors, who undertook to land and attack 
Dale in the rear. This compelled the party to fight 
in two directions at once. Dale and his companions 
kept up the battle in front, while Jerry Austill, James 
Smith,’ and one other man fought the warriors in the 
canoe to keep them from landing. One of the eleven 
was killed, and another swam ashore and succeeded 
in joining the Indians on the bank. 

Seeing how desperate the case was, Dale resolved 
upon a desperate remedy. He called for volunteers 
for a dangerous piece of work, and was at once joined 
by Jerry Austill, James Smith, and a negro man 
whose name was Caesar. With these men he leaped 
into the little canoe, and paddled towards the big 
Indian boat, meaning to fight the nine Indians who 
remained in it, although he and his canoe party num- 
bered only four men all told. 

As the two canoes approached each other, both 
parties tried to fire, but their gunpowder was wet, 
and so they grappled for a hand-to-hand battle. Jerry 


The Canoe Fight . 


6 1 

Austill, being in front, received the first attack. No 
sooner did the two canoes touch than an Indian 
sprang forward, and dealt the youth a terrible blow 
with a war-club, knocking him down, and making a 
dent in his skull which he carried through life. Once 
down, he would have been killed but for the quick- 
ness of Smith, who, seeing the danger his companion 
was in, raised his rifie. With a single blow he 
knocked over the Indian with whom Austill was 
struggling. 

Then Austill rose, and the fierce contest went on. 
Dale and his men rained their blows upon their foes, 
and received blows quite as lusty in return, but Cae- 
sar managed the boat so skilfully that, in spite of the 
superior numbers of the Indians, the fight was not 
very unequal. He held the little boat against the 
big one, but kept it at the end, so that the Indians 
in the other end of the big canoe could not reach 
Dale’s men. 

In this way those that were actually fighting Dale, 
Austill, and Smith never numbered more than three 


62 Strange Stories from History. 

or four at any one time, and so the three could not 
be borne down by mere force of numbers. Dale 
stood for a time with one foot in each boat ; then he 
stepped over into the Indian canoe, giving his com- 
rades more room, and crowding the Indians towards 
the end of their boat. 

One by one the savages fell, until only one was 
left facing Dale, who held Caesar’s gun, with bayonet 
attached, in his hand. This sole survivor was Tar- 
cha-chee, an Indian with whom Dale had hunted and 
lived, one whom he regarded as a friend, and whom 
he now wished to spare. But the savage was strong 
within the Indian’s breast, and he refused to accept 
mercy even from a man who had been his comrade 
and friend. Standing erect in the bow of the canoe, 
he shook himself, and said, in the Muscogee tongue, 
“ Big Sam, you are a man, I am another ; now for it.” 

With that he rushed forward, only to meet death 
at the hands of the friend who would gladly have 
spared him. 

The canoe fight was ended, but Dale’s work was 








' 


c 


4 




















WITH A SINGLE BLOW HE KNOCKED OVER THE INDIAN WITn WnOM AUSTILL WAS STRUGGLING. 





65 


The Canoe Fight . 

not yet done. His party on the bank were every 
minute more closely pressed, and if they were to be 
saved it must be done quickly. For this purpose he 
and his companions at once began clearing the big 
canoe of its load of dead Indians. Now that only 
the white men were there, the Indians upon the bank 
directed a galling fire upon the canoe, but by careen- 
ing it to one side Dale made a sort of breastwork of 
its thick gunwale, and thus succeeded in clearing it. 
When this was done he went ashore and quickly car- 
ried off the party there, landing all of them in safety 
on the other side. 

The hero of this singular battle lived until the 
year 1841. The whole story of his life is a romance 
of hardship, daring, and wonderful achievement. 
When he died, General John F. H. Claiborne, who 
knew him intimately, wrote a sketch of his career for 
a Natchez newspaper, in which he described him as 
follows : 

u In person General Dale was tall, erect, raw-boned, 
and muscular. In many respects, physical and moral, 


66 


Strange Stories from History . 


he resembled his antagonists of the woods. He had 
the square forehead, the high cheek-bones, the com- 
pressed lips, and, in fact, the physiognomy of an In- 
dian, relieved, however, by a firm, benevolent Saxon 
eye. Like the red men, too y his foot fell lightly upon 
the ground, and turned neither to the right nor left. 
He was habitually taciturn, his face grave, he spoke 
slowly and in low tones, and he seldom laughed. I 
observed of him what I have often noted as peculiar 
to border men of high attributes : he ^itertained the 
strongest attachment for the Indians, extolled their 
courage, their love of country, and many of their do- 
mestic qualities ; and I have often seen the wretched 
remnant of the Choctaws camped round his planta- 
tion and subsisting on his crops.” 

It is a curious fact that after the war ended, when 
Weatherford (l3,ed Eagle), who commanded the In- 
dians on the shore in this battle with Dale, was about 
to marry, he asked Dale to act as his best man, and 
the two who had fought each other so desperately 
stood side by side, as devoted friends, at the altar. 


THE BATTLE OF LAKE BORGNE. 

HOW THE BRITISH MADE A LANDING UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 

When the British made up their minds, near the 
end of the year 1814, to take New Orleans, and thus 
to get control of the Mississippi River, there seemed 
to be very littfe difficulty in their way. 

So far as anybody on either side could see* their 
only trouble was likely to be in making a landing. 
If they could once get their splendid army on shore 
anywhere near the city, there was very little to pre- 
vent them from taking the town, and if they had 
taken it, it is easy to see that the whole history of 
the United States would have been changed. 

They did make a landing, but they did not take 
New Orleans, and in the story of “The Battle in the 
Dark ” I shall tell how and why they failed. In the 
present story I want to tell how they landed. 


68 Strange Stories from History . 

The expedition consisted of a large fleet bearing a 
large army. At first the intention was to sail up the 
Mississippi River, but General Jackson made that 
impossible by building strong forts on the stream, 
and so it was necessary to try some other plan. 

It happens that New Orleans has two entrances 
from the sea. The river flows in front of the city, and 
by that route it is about a hundred miles from the 
city to the sea ; but just behind the town, only a few 
miles away, lies a great bay called Lake Pontchar- 
train. This bay is connected by a narrow strait with 
another bay called Lake Borgne, which is connected 
directly with the sea. 

Lake Borgne is very shallow, but the British knew 
little about it. They only knew that if they could 
land anywhere on the banks of Lake Borgne or Lake 
Pontchartrain they would be within an easy march 
of New Orleans. 

Accordingly, the fleet bearing the British army, 
instead of entering the mouth of the Mississippi, and 
trying to get to New Orleans in front, sailed in by 


The Battle of Lake Borgne . 69 

the back way, and anchored near the entrance of 
Lake Borgne. 

Here the British had their first sight of the prep- 
arations made to resist them. Six little gun-boats, 
carrying twenty-three guns in all, were afloat on the 
lake under command of Lieutenant Thomas Ap 
Catesby Jones. These gun-boats were mere mosqui- 
toes in comparison with the great British men-of-war, 
and when they made their appearance in the track of 
the invading fleet, the British laughed and wondered 
at the foolhardiness of the American commander in 
sending such vessels there. 

Lieutenant Thomas Ap Catesby Jones knew what 
he was about, however, as the British soon found out. 
He sailed up almost within cannon-shot of the enemy’s 
ships, and they, of course, gave chase to him. Then 
he nimbly sailed away, with the fleet after him. Very 
soon a large man-of-war ran aground ; then another 
and another struck the bottom, and the British Ad- 
miral began to understand the trick. It was evident 
that Lake Borgne was much too shallow for the large 


70 Strange Stories from History . 

ships, and so the commander called a halt, and trans- 
ferred the troops to the smaller vessels of the fleet. 

When that was done the chase was begun again 
by the smaller ships, and for a time with every pros- 
pect of success ; but presently even these ships were 
hard aground, and the whole British fleet which had 
been intended to carry the army across the lake was 
stuck fast in the mud near the entrance, and thirty 
miles from the point at which the landing was to be 
made. 

The British commander was at his wits’ end. It 
was clear that the ships could not cross the lake, and 
the only thing to be done was to transport the army 
across little by little in the ships’ boats, and make a 
landing in that way. But to do that while Lieuten- 
ant Jones and his gun-boats were afloat was mani- 
festly impossible. If it had been attempted, the 
little gun-boats, which could sail anywhere on the 
lake, would have destroyed the British army by 
boat-loads. 

There was nothing to be done until the saucy little 


The Battle of Lake Borgne. 71 

fleet was out of the way, and to put it out of the way 
was not easy. 

Lieutenant Jones was an officer very much given 
to hard fighting, and in this case the British saw that 
they must fight him at a disadvantage. As they 
could not get to him in their ships, they must make 
an attack in open boats, which, of course, was a very 
dangerous thing to do, as the American gun-boats 
were armed with cannon. 

The British commander wanted his bravest men 
for such work, and so he called for volunteers to 
man the boats. A thousand gallant fellows offered 
themselves, and were placed in fifty boats, under com- 
mand of Captain Lockyer. Each boat was armed 
with a carronade — a kind of small cannon — but the 
men well knew that the real fighting was not to be 
done with carronades. The only hope of success lay 
in a sudden, determined attack. The only way to 
capture the American gun-boats was to row up to 
them in the face of their fire, climb over their sides, 
and take them by force in a hand-to-hand fight. 


72 Strange Stories from History. 

When the flotilla set sail, on the 14th of December, 
Lieutenant Jones knew what their mode of attack 
would be quite as well as Captain Lockyer did. If 
he let them attack him in the open lake he knew very 
well that the British could overpower him and cap- 
ture his fleet ; but he did not intend to be attacked 
in the open lake if he could help it. His plan was 
to sail slowly, keeping just out of reach of the row- 
boats, and gradually to draw them to the mouth of the 
strait which leads into Lake Pontchartrain. At that 
point there was a well-armed fort, and if he could 
anchor his gun-boats across the narrow channel, he 
believed he could destroy the British flotilla with the 
aid of the fort, and thus beat off the expedition from 
New Orleans. 

Unluckily, while the fleet was yet far from the 
mouth of the strait the wind failed entirely, and the 
gun-boats were helpless. They could not sail without 
wind, and they must receive the attack right w^here 
they were. 

At daylight on the morning of December 15 the 


The Battle of Lake Borgne . 73 

British flotilla was about nine miles away, but was 
rapidly drawing nearer, the boats being propelled by 
oars. Lieutenant Jones called the commanders of his 
gun-boats together, gave them instructions, and in- 
formed them of his purpose to make as obstinate a 
fight as possible. His case was hopeless; his fleet 
would be captured, but by fighting obstinately he 
could at least gain time for General Jackson at New 
Orleans, and time was greatly needed there. 

Meanwhile the British boats, carrying a thousand 
men, all accustomed to desperate fighting, approached 
and anchored just out of gunshot. Captain Lockyer 
wished his men to go into action in the best condition 
possible, and therefore he came to anchor in order to 
rest the oarsmen, and to give the men time for breakfast. 

At half-past ten o’clock the British weighed anchor, 
and, forming in line, began the advance. As soon as 
they came within range the American gun-boats 
opened fire, but with little effect at first. Of course 
the British could not reply at such a distance, but 
being under fire, their chief need was to go forward 


74 Strange Stories from History . 

as fast and come to close quarters as quickly as pos- 
sible. The sailors bent to their oars, and the boats 
flew over the water. Soon the men at the bows be- 
gan to fire the carronades in reply to the American 
caunon. Then as the boats drew nearer, small arms 
came into use, and the battle grew fiercer with every 
moment. The British boats were with difficulty kept 
in line, and their advance grew slower. Oarsmen 
were killed, and time was lost in putting others into 
their places. Still the line was preserved, and the 
battle went on, the attacking boats slowly and stead- 
ily advancing all the time. 

Two of the American gun-boats had drifted out of 
place, and were considerably in advance of the rest. 
Seeing this, Captain Lockyer ordered the men com- 
manding the British boats to surround them, and a few 
minutes later the sailors were climbing over the sides 
of these vessels. Their attack was stoutly resisted. 
The American sailors above them fired volleys into 
their faces, and beat them back with handspikes. 
Scores of the British fell back into the water dead or 


The Battle of Lake Borgne. 75 

wounded, while their comrades pressed forward to fill 
their places. There were so many of them that in 
spite of all the Americans could do to beat them off 
they swarmed over the gunwales and gained the 
decks. Their work was not yet done, however. The 
Americans fiercely contested every inch of their ad- 
vance, and the two parties hewed each other down 
with cutlasses, the Americans being slowly beaten 
back by superior numbers, but still obstinately fight- 
ing until they could fight no more. 

One by one all the gunboats were taken in this 
way, Lieutenant Jones’s vessel holding out longest, 
and the Lieutenant himself fighting till he was 
stricken down with a severe wound. 

Having thus cleared Lake Borgne, the British were 
free to begin the work of landing. It was a terrible 
undertaking, however — scarcely less so than the fight 
itself. The whole army had to be carried thirty 
miles in open boats and landed in a swamp. The 
men were drenched with rain, and, a frost coming on, 

their clothes were frozen on their bodies. There was 
5 


76 Strange Stories from History . 

no fuel to be had on the island where they made their 
first landing, and to their sufferings from cold was 
added severe suffering from hunger before supplies 
of food could be brought to them. Some of the 
sailors who were engaged in rowing the boats were 
kept at work for four days and nights without relief. 

The landing was secured, however, and the British 
cared little for the sufferings it had cost them. They 
believed then that they had little more to do except 
to march twelve miles and take possession of the city, 
with its one hundred and fifty thousand bales of cot- 
ton and its ten thousand hogsheads of sugar. How 
it came about that they were disappointed is made 
clear in the next story. 


THE BATTLE IN THE DARK. 

HOW GENERAL JACKSON RECEIVED THE BRITISH. 

When the British succeeded in taking Lieutenant 
Jones’s little gun-boats and making a landing, after 
the manner described in the preceding story, they 
supposed that the hardest part of their work was 
done. It was not far from their landing-place to 
New Orleans, and there was nothing in their way. 
Their army numbered nearly twenty thousand men, 
and the men were the best soldiers that England 
had. Many of them were Wellingtb&^veterans. 

It seemed certain that such an army could march 
into New Orleans with very little trouble indeed, and 
everybody on both sides thought so — everybody, that 
is to say, but General Jackson. He meant to fight that 
question out, and as the Legislature and many of the 
people in the city would do nothing to help him, he 


78 Strange Stories from History . 

put the town under martial law, and worked night 
and day to get together something like an army. 

On the 23d of December, 1814, the British arrived 
at a point a few miles below the city, and went into 
camp about noon. As soon as Jackson heard of their 
arrival he said to the people around him, “ Gentle- 
men, the British are below : we must fight them to- 
night” 

He immediately ordered his troops forward. He 
had made a soldier of everybody who could carry a 
gun, and his little army was a curiously mixed col- 
lection of men. There were a few regulars, in uni- 
form ; there were some Mississippi troopers, and Cof- 
fee’s Kentucky and Tennessee hunters, in hunting- 
shirts and jeans trousers ; there were volunteers of all 
sorts from the streets of New Orleans — merchants, 
lawyers, laborers, clerks, and clergymen — armed with 
shot-guns, rifles, and old muskets; there were some 
criminals whom Jackson had released from prison 
on condition that they would fight; there was a 
battalion of free negroes, who were good soldiers ; 




» 
















GENERAL JACKSON AT NEW ORLEANS 






The Battle in the Dark . 8 1 

and, finally, there were- about twenty Choctaw In- 
dians. 

With this mixed crowd Jackson had to fight the 
very best troops in the British army. Only about 
half of his men had ever heard a bullet whistle, and 
less than half of them were drilled and disciplined ; 
but they were brave men who believed in their gen- 
eral, and they were about to fight for their country 
as brave men should. When all were counted — 
backwoodsmen, regulars, city volunteers, negroes, In- 
dians, and all — the whole army numbered only 2131 
men ! But, weak as this force was, Jackson had 
made up his mind to fight with it. He knew that 
the British were too strong for him, but he knew too 
that every day would make them stronger, as more 
and more of their troops would come forward each day. 

The British camp was nine miles below the city, 
on a narrow strip of land between the river and a 
swamp. Jackson sent a gun-boat, the Carolina, down 
the river, with orders to anchor in front of the camp 
and pour a fire of grape-shot into it. He sent Coffee 


82 Strange Stories from History. 

across to the swamp, and ordered him to creep 
through the bushes, and thus get upon the right 
flank of the British. He kept the rest of his army 
under his own command, ready to advance from the 
front upon the enemy’s position. 

But no attack was to be made until after dark. 
The army was kept well out of sight, and the British 
had no suspicion that any attack was thought of. 
They did not regard Jackson’s men as soldiers at all, 
but called them a posse comitatus of ragamuffins — 
that is to say, a mob of ragged citizens — and the most 
they expected such a mob to do was to wait some- 
where below the city until the British soldiers should 
get ready to drive them away with a few volleys. 

So the British lighted their camp-fires, stacked their 
arms for the night, and cooked their suppers. They 
meant to stay where they were for a day or two 
until the rest of their force could come up, and then 
they expected to march into the town and make them- 
selves at home. 

Night came on, and it was exceedingly dark. At 


The Battle in the Dark. 


83 


half-past seven o’clock there came a flash and a roar. 
The Carolina , lying in the river, within a few hun- 
dred yards of the camp, had begun to pour her 
broadsides into the British quarters. Her cannon 
vomited fire, and sent a hail-storm of grape-shot into 
the camp, while the marines on board kept up a 
steady fire of small-arms. 

The British were completely surprised, but they 
were cool-headed old soldiers, who were not to be 
scared by a surprise. They quickly formed a line on 
the bank, and, bringing up some cannon, gave battle 
to the saucy gun-boat. 

For ten minutes this fight went on between the 
Americans on the river and the British on shore; 
then Jackson ordered his troops to advance. His 
columns rushed forward and fell upon the enemy, 
again surprising them, and forcing them to fight on 
two sides at once. Coffee, who was hidden over in 
the swamp, no sooner heard the roar of the Carolina's 
guns than he gave the word to advance, and, rushing 
out of the bushes, his rough Tennesseeans and Ken- 


84 Strange Stories from History . 

tuckians attacked still another side of the enemy’s 
position. 

Still the sturdy British held their ground, and 
fought like the brave men and good soldiers that they 
were. It was too dark for anybody to see clearly 
what was going on. The lines on both sides were 
soon broken up into independent groups of soldiers, 
who could not see in what direction they were march- 
ing, or maintain anything like a regular fight. Regi- 
ments and battalions wandered about at their own 
discretion, fighting whatever bodies of the enemy 
they met, and sometimes getting hopelessly entangled 
with each other. Never was there so complete a 
jumble on a battle-field. Whenever two bodies of 
troops met, they had to call out to each other to find 
out whether they were friends or foes; then, if one 
body proved to be Americans and the other British, 
they delivered a volley, and rushed upon each other 
in a desperate struggle for mastery. 

Sometimes a regiment would win success in one 
direction, and just as its enemy on that side was 


The Battle in the Dark . 


85 

driven back, it would be attacked from the opposite 
quarter. Coffee’s men were armed with squirrel 
rifles, which, of course, had no bayonets ; but the men 
had their long hunting-knives, and with no better 
weapons than these they did not hesitate to make 
charge after charge upon the lines of gleaming bayo- 
nets. 

The British suffered terribly from the first, but 
their steadiness was never lost for a moment. The 
mad onset of the Americans broke their lines, and in 
the darkness it was impossible to form them again 
promptly ; but still the men kept up the fight, 
while the officers, as rapidly as they could, di- 
rected their detached columns towards protected po- 
sitions. 

Retreating slowly and in as good order as they 
could, the British got beyond the range of the Caro- 
lina's guns by nine o’clock, and, finding a position 
where a bank of earth served for a breastwork, they 
made a final stand there. It was impossible to drive 
them from such a position, and so, little by little, the 


86 Strange Stories from History . 

Americans withdrew, and at ten o’clock the Battle in 
the Dark was at an end. 

Now let ns see what Jackson had gained or lost by 
this hasty attack. The British were still in a posi- 
tion to threaten New Orleans. They had not been 
driven away, and the rest of their large army, which 
had not yet come up, was hurrying forward to help 
them. They had lost a great many more men than 
Jackson had, but they could spare men better than 
he could, and they were not whipped by any means. 
Still, the attack was equal to a victory for the Amer- 
icans. It is almost certain that if Jackson had waited 
another day before fighting he would have lost New 
Orleans, and the whole Southwest would have been 
overrun. 

But, by making this night attack, he showed the 
British that he could and would fight ; and they, find- 
ing what kind of a defence he meant to make, made 
up their minds to move slowly and cautiously. They 
waited for the rest of their force to come up, and 
while they were waiting and getting ready Jackson 


The Battle in the Dark. 87 

had more than two weeks’ time in which to collect 
troops from the country north of him, to get arms 
and ammunition, and to throw up strong fortifica- 
tions. When the British made their grand attack on 
the 8 th of January, 1815, they found Jackson ready 
for them. His army was increased, his men were 
full of confidence, and, best of all, he had a line of 
strong earth-works to fight behind. It is commonly 
said that his fortifications were made of cotton-bales, 
but that is an error. When he first began to fortify, 
he used some cotton-bales, and some sugar, which, it 
W’as thought, would do instead of sand ; but in some 
of the early skirmishes it was found that the sugar 
was useless, because it would not stop cannon-balls ; 
while the cotton was worse, because it took fire, and 
nearly suffocated the men behind it with smoke. The 
cotton and sugar were at once thrown aside, and the 
battle of New Orleans was fought behind earth-works. 
In that battle the British were so badly worsted that 
they gave up all idea of taking New Orleans, which, 
a month before, they had believed it would be so easy 
to capture. 


THE TROUBLESOME BURGHERS. 


Philip yah Artevelde was a Dutchman. His 
father, Jacob, had been Governor of Ghent, and had 
made himself a great name by leading a revolt 
against the Count of Flanders, and driving that ty- 
rant out of the country on one occasion. 

Philip was a quiet man, who attended to his own 
affairs and took no part in public business; but in 
the year 1381 the good people of Ghent found them- 
selves in a very great difficulty. Their city was sub- 
ject to the Count of Flanders, who oppressed them 
in every way. He and his nobles thought nothing 
of the common people, but taxed them heavily and 
interfered with their business. 

The city of Bruges was the rival of Ghent, and in 
those days rivals in trade were enemies. The Bruges 
people were not satisfied with trying to make more 


The Troublesome Burghers. 89 

money and get more business than Ghent could, but 
they wanted Ghent destroyed, and so they supported 
Count Louis in all that he did to injure their neigh- 
boring city. 

Having this quarrel on their hands, the Ghent 
people did not know what to do. Count Louis was 
too strong for them, and they were very much afraid 
he would destroy their town and put the people to 
death. 

A public meeting was held, and remembering 
how well old Jacob van Artevelde had served them 
against the father of Count Louis, they made his son 
Philip their captain, and told him he must manage 
this quarrel for them. 

Philip undertook this duty, and tried to settle the 
trouble in some peaceable way; but the Count was 
angry, and would not listen to anything that Van 
Artevelde proposed. He said the Ghent people 
were rebels, and must submit without any condi- 
tions at all, and this the sturdy Ghent burghers 
refused to do. 


90 Strange Stories from History. 

Count Louis would not march against the town 
and give the people a fair chance to fight the matter 
out. He preferred to starve them, and for that pur- 
pose he put soldiers on all the roads leading towards 
Ghent, and refused to allow any provisions to be 
taken to the city. 

The people soon ate up nearly all the food they 
had, and when the spring of 1382 came they were 
starving. Something must be done at once, and 
Philip van Artevelde decided that it was of no use to 
resist any longer. He took twelve deputies with 
him, and went to beg the Count for mercy. He 
offered to submit to any terms the Count might pro- 
pose, if he would only promise not to put any of the 
people to death. Philip even offered himself as a 
victim, agreeing that the Count should banish him 
from the country as a punishment, if he would spare 
the people of the town. But the haughty Count 
would promise nothing. He said that all the people 
of Ghent from fifteen to sixty years old must march 
half-way to Bruges bareheaded, with no clothes on 


The Troublesome Burghers . 9 1 

but their shirts, and each with a rope around his 
neck, and then he would decide how many of them 
he would put to death and how many he would 
spare. 

The Count thought the poor Ghent people would 
have to submit to this, and he meant to put them all 
to death when they should thus come out without 
arms to surrender. He therefore called on his vassals 
to meet him in Bruges at Easter, and to go out with 
him to “ destroy these troublesome burghers.” 

But the “ troublesome burghers,” as we shall see 
presently, were not the kind of men to walk out bare- 
headed, with ropes around their necks, and submit to 
destruction. 

Philip van Artevelde returned sadly to Ghent, on 
the 29th of April, and told the people what the 
Count had said. Then the gallant old soldier Peter 
van den Bossche exclaimed : 

“In a few days the town of Ghent shall be the 
most honored or the most humbled town in Christen- 
dom” 


,92 Strange Stories from History . 

Van Artevelde called the burghers together, and 
told them what the situation was. There were 30,000 
people in Ghent, and there was no food to be had for 
them. There was no hope that the Count would offer 
any better terms, or that anybody would come to their 
assistance. They must decide quickly what they 
would do, and Philip said there were three courses 
open to them. First, if they chose, they could wall 
up the gates of the town and die of starvation. 
Secondly, they could accept the Count’s terms, march 
out with the ropes around their necks, and take what- 
ever punishment the Count might put upon them. 
If they should decide to do that, Philip said he 
would offer himself to the Count to be hanged first. 
Thirdly, they could get together 5000 of their best 
men, march to Bruges, and fight the quarrel out. 

The answer of the people was that Philip must 
decide for them, and he at once said, “ Then we will 
fight.” 

The 5000 men were got together, and on the 1st of 
May they marched out of the town to win or lose the 


93 


The Troublesome Burghers . 

desperate battle. The priests of the city stood at the 
gates as the men marched out, and prayed for bless- 
ings upon them. The old men, the women, and the 
children cried out, “ If you lose the battle you need 
not return to Ghent, for you will find your families 
dead in their homes.” 

The only food there was for these 5000 men was 
carried in five little carts, while on another cart two 
casks of wine were taken. 

The next day Van Artevelde placed his little army 
in line on the common of Beverhoutsveld, at Oedelem, 
near Bruges. There was a marsh in front of them, 
and Van Artevelde protected their flank by a fortifi- 
cation consisting of the carts and some stakes driven 
into the ground. He then sent a messenger to the 
Count, begging him to pardon the people of Ghent, 
and, having done this, he ordered his men to go to 
sleep for the night. 

At daybreak the next morning the little army was 
aroused to make final preparations for the desperate 
work before them. The priests exhorted the men to 
6 


94 Strange Stories from History . 

fight to the death, showing them how useless it would 
be to surrender or to run away, as they were sure to 
be put to death at any rate. Their only hope for 
life was in victory, and if they could not win that, it 
would be better to die fighting like men than to sur- 
render and be put to death like dogs. 

After these exhortations were given, seven gray 
friars said mass and gave the sacrament to all the 
soldiers. Then the five cart-loads of provisions and 
the two casks of wine were divided among the men, 
for their last breakfast. When that meal was eaten, 
the soldiers of Ghent had not an ounce of food left 
anywhere. 

Meanwhile the Count called his men together in 
Bruges, and got them ready for battle ; but the people 
of Bruges were so sure of easily destroying the little 
Ghent army that they would not wait for orders, 
but marched out shouting and singing and making 
merry. 

As their column marched along the road in this 
noisy fashion, the “ troublesome burghers ” of Ghent 


97 


The Troublesome Burghers . 

suddenly sprang upon them, crying,* “ Ghent ! 
Ghent!” 

The charge was so sudden and so fierce that the 
Bruges people gave way, and fled in a panic towards 
the town, with Van Artevelde’s men at their heels in 
hot pursuit. The Count’s regular troops tried to 
make a stand, but the burghers of Ghent came upon 
them so furiously that they too became panic-stricken 
and fled. The Count himself ran with all his might, 
and as soon as he entered the city he ordered the 
gates to be shut. He was so anxious to save himself 
from the fury of Van Artevelde’s soldiers that he 
wanted to close the gates at once and leave those of 
his own people who were still outside to their fate. 
But it was already too late. Van Artevelde’s column 
had followed the retreating crowd so fast that it had 
already pushed its head into the town, and there was 
no driving it back. The five thousand “troublesome 
burghers,” with their swords in their hands, and still 
crying “ Ghent !” swarmed into Bruges, and quickly 
took possession of the town. The Count’s army was 


Strange Stories from History. 


utterly routed and scattered, and the Count himself 
would have been taken prisoner if one of the Ghent 
burghers had not hidden him and helped him to 
escape from the city. 

Van Artevelde’s soldiers, who had eaten the last 
of their food that morning in the belief that they 
would never eat another meal on earth, supped that 
night on the richest dishes that Bruges could sup- 
ply ; and now that the Count was overthrown, great 
wagon trains of provisions poured into poor, starving 
Ghent. 

There was a great golden dragon on the belfry of 
Bruges, of which the Bruges people were very proud. 
That dragon had once stood on the Church of St. 
Sophia in Constantinople, and the Emperor Baldwin 
had sent it as a present to Bruges. In token of their 
victory Van Artevelde’s “ troublesome burghers ” took 
down the golden dragon and carried it to Ghent. 


THE DEFENCE OF ROCHELLE. 

HOW THE CITY OF REFUGE FOUGHT FOR LIBERTY. 

In the old times, when people were in the habit 
of fighting each other about their religion, the little 
French seaport Rochelle was called “ the city of ref- 
uge.” The Huguenots, or French Protestants, held 
the place, and when the armies of the French king 
tried to take it, in the latter part of the sixteenth 
century, they were beaten off and so badly used in 
the fight that the king was glad to make terms with 
the townspeople. 

An agreement was therefore made that they should 
have their own religion, and manage their own affairs; 
and to make sure of this the king gave Rochelle so 
many special rights that it became almost a free city. 
After that, whenever a Protestant in any part of France 
found that he could not live peaceably in his own 


ioo Strange Stories from History. 

Lome, he went to Rochelle, and that is the way the 
place came to be called the city of refuge. 

For a good many years the people of Rochelle went 
on living quietly. They had a fine harbor of their 
own, their trade was good, and they were allowed to 
manage their own affairs. At last the new King of 
France made up his mind that he would not have two 
religions in his country, but would make everybody 
believe as he did. This troubled the people of Ro- 
chelle, but the king sent them word that he only 
meant to make them change their religion by showing 
them that his was better, and that he did not intend 
to trouble them in any way. 

In those days promises of that kind did not count 
for much ; but the king’s prime - minister, Cardinal 
Richelieu, who really managed everything, knew very 
well that Rochelle could give a great deal of trouble 
if it chose, and so, perhaps, he really would have let 
the town alone if it had not been for the meddling 
of the English prime-minister, Buckingham. 

This Buckingham, with an English fleet and army, 


The Defence of Rochelle. ioi 

sailed into the harbor of Rochelle in the middle of 
July, 1627, and undertook to help the people against 
the French king. If Buckingham had been either a 
soldier or a sailor, he might have made himself mas- 
ter of the French king’s forts near Rochelle at once ; 
but, although he had command of a fleet and an army, 
he really knew nothing about the business of a com- 
mander, and he blundered so badly that the generals 
of the French king got fresh troops and provisions 
into the forts, and were able to hold them in spite of 
all that the English could do. 

Seeing how matters stood, Richelieu at once sent an 
army to surround Rochelle, and at daylight on the 
10th of August the people found a strong force in 
front of the town. Rochelle had not made up its 
mind to join the English, and the magistrates sent 
word to the French general that they wanted peace. 
They said they were loyal to the French king, and 
even offered to help drive the English away, if their 
king would promise not to break the treaty that had 
been made with them many years before. 


102 Strange Stories from History. 

It was too late to settle the matter in that way, 
however. The French general meant to make the 
town surrender, and so, while the English were fight- 
ing to get control of the island of Rhe, at some dis- 
tance from the town, he began to build works around 
Rochelle. His plan was to shut the people up in the 
city and cut oif their supplies of food ; and when the 
Rochelle folk saw what he was doing, they opened 
fire on his men. 

The war was now begun, and the Huguenots made 
terms with Buckingham, hoping, with his help, to win 
in the struggle. Buckingham promised to help them, 
and he did try to do so in his blundering way ; but 
he did them more harm than good, for when he 
found that he could not take the forts he sailed away, 
taking with him three hundred tons of grain, which 
he ought to have sent into the town. 

It was November when the English left, and Ro- 
chelle was in a very bad situation. Richelieu set to 
work to shut the town in and seal it up. He built 
strong works all around the land side, and then, with 


RICHELIEU SURVEYING THE WORKS AT ROCHELLE 






fc 


B. -1 

I} 





* 




The Defence of Rochelle. 105 

great labor, brought earth and stones and built a 
mole, or strip of land, nearly all the way across the 
mouth of the harbor, so that no boats could pass in 
or out. 

The situation was a terrible one, but the people of 
Rochelle were brave, and had no thought of flinching. 
They chose the mayor, Guiton, for their commander, 
and when he accepted the office he laid his dagger on 
the table, saying : “ I will thrust that dagger into the 
heart of the first man who speaks of giving up the 
town.” He then went to work to defend the place. 
He strengthened the works, and made soldiers of all 
the men in the city, and all the boys, too, for that 
matter. Everybody who could handle a weapon of 
any kind had to take his place in the ranks. England 
had promised to send help, and the only question, 
Guiton thought, was whether or not he could hold 
out till the help should come ; so he laid his plans to 
resist as long as possible. 

The French in great numbers stormed the defences 
time after time; but the brave Rochellese always 


106 Strange Stories from History . 

drove them back with great loss. It was clear from 
the first that Guiton would not give way, and that 
no column, however strong, could force the city 
gates. But there was an enemy inside the town 
which was harder to fight than the one outside. 
There was famine in Rochelle ! The cattle were eat- 
en up, and the horses went next. Then everything 
that could be turned into food was carefully used and 
made to go as far as it would. Guiton stopped every 
kind of waste ; but day by day the food supply grew 
smaller, and the people grew weaker from hunger. 
Starvation was doing its work. Every day the list 
of deaths grew longer, and when people met in the 
streets they stared at each other with lean, white, hun- 
gry faces, wondering who would be the next to go. 

Still these heroic people had no thought of giving 
up. They were fighting for liberty, and they loved 
that more than life. The French were daily charging 
their works, but could not move the stubborn, starv- 
ing Rochellese. 

The winter dragged on slowly. Spring came, and 


The Defence of Rochelle. 107 

yet no help had come from England. In March the 
French, thinking that the people must be worn out, 
hurled their heaviest columns against the lines; but, 
do what they would, they could not break through 
anywhere, and had to go back to their works, and 
wait for famine to conquer a people who could not 
be conquered by arms. 

One morning in May an English fleet was seen ' 
outside the mole. The news ran through the town 
like wildfire. Help was at hand, and the poor starv- 
ing people were wild with joy. Men ran through 
the streets shouting and singing songs of thanksgiv- 
ing. They had borne terrible sufferings, but now help 
was coming, and they were sure that their heroic en- 
durance would not be thrown away. Thousands of 
their comrades had fallen fighting, and thousands of 
their women and children had starved to death ; but 
what was that if, after all, Rochelle was not to lose 
her liberties ? 

Alas ! their hope was a vain one, and their joy soon 
turned to sorrow. The English fleet did nothing. It 


108 Strange Stories from History . 

hardly tried to do anything ; but after lying within 
sight of the town for a w T hile it sailed away again and 
left Rochelle to its fate. 

Richelieu was sure that Guiton would surrender 
now, and so he sent a messenger to say that he would 
spare the lives of all the people if the town were giv- 
en up within three days. But the gallant Guiton 
was not ready even yet to give up the struggle. 
“ Tell Cardinal Richelieu,” he said to the messenger, 
“ that we are his very obedient servants and that 
was all the answer he had to make. 

When the summer came some food was grown in 
the city gardens, but this went a very little way 
among so many people, and the famine had now 
grown frightful. The people gathered all the shell- 
fish they could find at low tide. They ate the leaves 
off the trees, and even the grass of the gardens and 
lawns was used for food. Everything that could in 
any way help to support life was consumed ; every- 
thing that could be boiled into the thinnest soup w~as 
turned to account; everything that could be chewed 


The Defence of Rochelle. 109 

for its juice was used to quiet the pains of fierce hun- 
ger ; but all was not enough. Men, women, and chil- 
dren died by thousands. Every morning when the 
new guard went to take the place of the old one 
many of the sentinels were found dead at their posts 
from starvation. 

Still the heroic Guiton kept up the fight, and no- 
body dared say anything to him about giving up. 
He still hoped for help from England, and meant to 
hold out until it should come, cost what it might. In 
order that the soldiers might have a little more to 
eat, and live and fight a little longer, he turned all 
the old people and those who were too weak to fight 
out of the town. The French would not let these 
poor wretches pass their lines, but made an attack on 
them, and drove them back towards Kochelle. But 
Guiton would not open the city gates to them. He 
said they would starve to death if he let them into 
Rochelle, and they might as well die outside as inside 
the gates. 

At last news came that the English had made a 


i io Strange Stories from History . 

treaty with the French, and so there was no longer 
any hope of help for Rochelle, and truly the place 
could hold out no longer. The famine was at its 
worst. Out of about thirty thousand people only 
five thousand were left alive, and they were starving; 
of six hundred Englishmen who had stayed to help the 
Rochellese all were dead but sixty-two. Corpses lay 
thick in the streets, for the people were too weak, from 
fasting, even to bury their dead. The end had come. 
On the 30th of October, 1628, after nearly fifteen 
months of heroic effort and frightful suffering, Ro- 
chelle surrendered. 

Richelieu at once sent food into the town, and 
treated the people very kindly ; but he took away all 
the old rights and privileges of the city. He pulled 
down all the earthworks used by the defenders of the 
place, and gave orders that nobody should build 
even a garden fence anywhere near the town. He 
made a law that no Protestant w T ho was not already 
a citizen of Rochelle should go thither to live, and that 
the “city of refuge” should never again receive any 
stranger without a permit from the king. 


THE SAD STORY OF A BOY KING. 

London took a holiday on the 16th of July, 1377. 
There were processions of merry-makers in the streets, 
and the windows were crowded with gayly dressed 
men, women, and children. The great lords, glitter- 
ing in armor, and mounted upon splendid steel-clad 
horses, marched through the town. The bishops and 
clergymen in gorgeous robes made a more solemn, 
but not less attractive show. The trade-guilds were 
out in their best clothing, bearing the tools of their 
trades instead of arms. Clowns in motley, merry- 
makers of all kinds, great city dignitaries, lords and 
commons — everybody,, in short, made a mad and 
merry holiday ; and at night the houses were illumi- 
nated, and great bonfires were lighted in the streets. 

All England was wild with joy; but the happiest 
person in the land was Richard Plantagenet, a boy 


1 1 2 Strange Stories from History . 

eleven years of age. Indeed, it was for this boy’s 
sake and in his honor that all this feasting and merry- 
making went on, for on that day young Richard was 
crowned King of England; and in those times a 
king of England was a much more important person 
than now, because the people had not then learned 
to govern themselves, and the king had powers which 
Englishmen would not allow any man to have in our 
time. 

Richard was too young to govern wisely, and so a 
council was appointed to help him until he should 
grow up; but in the meantime he was a real king, 
boy as he was, and it is safe to say that he was the 
happiest boy in England on that July day, when all 
London took a holiday in his honor. 

But if he had known what this crowning was to 
lead to, young Richard might have been very glad to 
change places with any baker’s or butcher’s boy in 
London. The boy king had some uncles and cousins 
who were very great people, and who gave him no 
little trouble after a while. He had wars on his 




The Sad Story of a Boy King. 

hands, too, and needed a great deal more money than 
the people were willing to give him ; and so, when 
he grew older and took the government into his own 
hands, he found troubles all around him. The Irish 
people rebelled frequently ; the Scotch were hostile ; 
there was trouble with Spain because Richard’s uncle 
wanted to become king of that country, and there 
was a standing war with France. 

But this was not all. In order to carry on these 
wars the king was obliged to have money ; and when 
he ordered taxes to be collected the common people, 
led by Wat Tyler, rose in rebellion. They marched 
into London, seized the Tower, and put to death the 
treasurer of the kingdom, the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, and many other persons high in the govern- 
ment. Tyler was so insolent one day that the Lord 
Mayor of London killed him ; but the boy king, who 
was only sixteen years old, seeing that the rebels 
were too strong for him, put himself at their head, 
and marched with them out of the city ; and so the 
king, against whom the rebellion was made, became 
7 


1 14 Strange Stories from History. 

the leader of the rebels. As soon as matters grew 
quiet, however, he broke all the promises he had 
made, and punished the chief rebels very harshly. 

Not long after this one of the king’s uncles made him- 
self master of the kingdom by force, and it was several 
years before Richard could put him out of power. 

But the greatest of all Richard’s troubles were yet 
to come. His cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the son of 
old John of Gaunt, had misbehaved, and Richard had 
sent him out of England, not to return for ten years. 
But while Richard was in Ireland putting down a 
rebellion there, Henry came back to England, raised 
an army, and was joined by many of the most pow- 
erful men in the kingdom. When Richard came 
back from Ireland Henry made him a prisoner, and 
not long afterwards the great men made up their 
minds to set up Henry as the king instead of Rich- 
ard. They made Richard sign a paper giving up his 
right to the crown, and then, to make the matter 
sure, Parliament passed a law that Richard should 
be king no longer. 


“5 


The Sad Story of a Boy King . 

Richard was only thirty-three years old when all 
this was done, but after so many troubles he might 
well have been glad to give up his kingship, if that 
had been the end of the matter. But a king who 
has been set aside is always a dangerous man to have 
in the kingdom, and it would not do to let Richard 
go free. He might gather his friends around him 
and give trouble. So it was decided that the unfort- 
unate man should be shut up in a prison for the rest 
of his life. 

But even this was not the worst of the matter. 
Richard had a wife — Queen Isabella — whom he loved 
very dearly, and if the two could have gone away to- 
gether into some quiet place to live, they might still 
have been happy in spite of being under guard all 
the time. But the new king would not have it so. 
He gave orders that Richard should be shut up close- 
ly in a prison, and that Isabella should go back to 
France, where Richard had married her. 

This was a terrible thing for the young man and 
his younger wife, who might have had a long life of 


1 1 6 Strange Stories from History . 

happiness still before them if Richard had never been 
a king. But Richard had been King of England, 
and so he had to give up both his freedom and his 
wife. 

In his play of “ King Richard the Second ” Shake- 
speare makes a very touching scene of their parting. 
In the play their farewell takes place in the street, as 
shown in our picture. Isabella, anxious to see her 
husband once more before they part forever, waits at 
a point which she knows he must pass on his way to 
prison. There they meet and talk together for the 
last time on earth. The words which Shakespeare 
puts into their mouths are terribly sad, but very 
beautiful. You will find the scene at the beginning 
of Act V. of the play. The picture shows the two at 
the moment when Richard moves away to his prison, 
leaving Isabella to mourn for him in a nunnery for 
the rest of her life. 

It is not certainly known what became of Richard 
after he was taken to prison. It is believed that he 
was murdered there — perhaps starved to death — but 





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The Sad Story of a Boy King, 1 1 9 

there is a story that he got away and lived in Scot- 
land, dying there in 1419. It is not at all likely that 
the story is true, however, and the common belief has 
always been that he died or was killed in Pontefract 
Castle, where he was imprisoned. 

However that may be, Richard’s life was a terri- 
bly unhappy one, and all his sorrows grew out of the 
fact that he was a king. If he could have looked for- 
ward on that July day when the people were making 
merry in his honor, and could have known all that 
was to happen to him, instead of being the happiest 
boy in England on his coronation day, he would have 
been the most wretched. 


TWO OBSCURE HEROES. 

HOW THE PARTISAN WARFARE IN THE CAROLINAS WAS BEGUN. 

When the British marched up from Savannah and 
took Charleston, in the spring of 1780, they thought 
the Revolution was at an end in the Southern States, 
and it really seemed so. Even the patriots thought 
it was useless to resist any longer, and so when the 
British ordered all the people to come together at 
different places and enrol themselves as British sub- 
jects, most of them were ready to do it, simply 
because they thought they could not help them- 
selves. 

Only a few daring men here and there were bold 
enough to think of refusing, and but for them the 
British could have set up the royal power again in 
South Carolina, and then they would have been free 
to take their whole force against the patriots farther 


Two Obscure Heroes . 


I 2 I 


north. The fate of the whole country depended, to 
a large extent, upon tne courage of the few men who 
would not give up even at such a time, but kept up 
the fight against all odds. These brave men forced 
the British to keep an army in the South which they 
needed farther north. 

The credit of beginning this kind of partisan war- 
fare belongs chiefly to two or three plain men, who 
did it simply because they loved their country more 
than their ease. 

The man who first began it was Justice Gaston — a 
white-haired patriot who lived on a little stream 
called Fishing Creek, near Rocky Mount. He w T as 
eighty years of age, and might well have thought him- 
self too old to care about war matters ; but he was a 
brave man and a patriot, and the people who lived 
near him were in the habit of taking his advice and 
doing as he did. 

When the news came that Tarleton had killed a 
band of patriots under Colonel Buford in cold blood 
Justice Gaston called his nine sons and many of his 


122 Strange Stories from History. 

nephews around him. Joining hands, these young 
men promised each other that they never would take 
the British oath, and never would give up the cause, 
come what might. 

Soon afterwards a British force came to the neigh- 
borhood, and all the people were ordered to meet at 
Rocky Mount to enrol their names and take the oath. 
One of the British officers went to see Justice Gaston, 
and tried to persuade him that it was folly to refuse. 
He knew that if Gaston advised the people to give 
up, there would be no trouble ; but the white-haired 
patriot told him to his face that he would never take 
the oath himself or advise anybody else to do so. 

As soon as the officer left the old man sent for his 
friends, and about thirty brave fellows met at his 
house that night, with their rifles in their hands. 
They knew there would be a strong force of British 
and Tories at Rocky Mount the next day, but, in spite 
of the odds against them, they made up their minds 
to attack the place, and when the time came they 
did so. Creeping through the woods, .they suddenly 


Two Obscure Heroes. 


123 


came upon the crowd, dnd after a sharp fight sent the 
British flying helter-skllter in every direction. This 
stopped the work ofl^en rolling the people as British 
subjects, and it did more than that. It showed the 
patriots through the whole country that they could 
still give the British a great deal of trouble, and after 
this affair many of the men who had thought of giving 
up rubbed up their rifles instead, and formed little 
bands of fighting men to keep the war going. 

Another man who did much to stir up partisan 
warfare was the Bev. William Martin, an old and pi- 
ous preacher in the Scotch-Irish settlements. These 
Scotch-Irish were very religious people, and their 
preacher was their leader in all things. One Sunday, 
after. the news had come to the settlement that Bu- 
ford’s men had been killed by the British in cold 
blood, the eloquent old man went into his pulpit and 
preached about the duty of fighting. In the after- 
noon he preached again, and even when the service 
was over he went on in the open air, still preaching 
to the people how they should fight for their country, 


124 Strange Stories from History. 

until all the men in the settlement were full of fight- 
ing spirit. The women told*the men to go and do 
their duty, and that they would take care of the 
crops. 

These little bands of patriots were too small to 
fight regular battles, or even to hold strong posts. 
They had to hide in the woods and swamps, and 
only came out when they saw a chance to strike a 
blow. Then the blow fell like lightning, and the 
men who dealt it quickly hid themselves again. 

They had signs by which they told each other 
what they were going to do. A twig bent down, a 
few stones strung along a path, or any other of a hun- 
dred small signs, served to tell every patriot when 
and where to meet his friends. A man riding about, 
breaking a twig here and there, or making some other 
sign of the kind, could call together a large force at 
a chosen spot within a few hours. The men brought 
out in this way would fall suddenly upon some stray 
British force that was off its guard, and utterly de- 
stroy it. The British would at once send a strong 








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Two Obscure Heroes . 


127 


body of troops to punish the daring patriots, but the 
redcoat leader would look in vain for anybody to pun- 
ish. The patriots could scatter and hide as quickly 
as they could come together. 

Finding that they could not destroy these patriot 
companies, the British and Tories took their revenge 
on women and children. They burned the houses of 
the patriots, carried off their crops, and killed their 
cattle, so as to starve their families ; but the women 
were as brave as the men, and from first to last not 
one of them ever wished her husband or son to give 
up the fight. 

If the patriots could not conquer the British, they 
at least kept them in a hornets’ nest. If they could 
not drive them out of South Carolina, they could 
keep them there, which was nearly as good a thing 
to do, because every soldier that Cornwallis had to 
keep in the South would have been sent to some 
other part of the country to fight the Americans if 
the Carolinians had let the British alone. 

In this way small bands of resolute men kept Corn- 


128 Strange Stories from History . 

wallis busy, and held the state for the American 
cause, until General Greene went south and took 
command. Greene was one of the greatest of the 
American generals, and after a long campaign he 
drove the British out of the state. But if it had not 
been for the partisans the South would have been 
lost long before he could be spared to go there ; and 
if the partisans had not kept a British army busy 
there, it might have gone very hard with the Ameri- 
cans in the rest of the country. 

When we rejoice in the freedom of our country we 
ought not to forget how much we owe the partisans, 
and especially such men as Justice Gaston and the 
Rev. William Martin, who first set the partisans 
at their work. It would have been much easier and 
pleasanter for them to remain quiet under British 
rule; and they had nothing to gain for themselves, 
but everything to lose, by the course they took. 
Gaston knew that his home would be burned for 
what he did, and the eloquent old Scotch preacher 
knew that he would be put into a prison-pen for 


Two Obscure Heroes . 


129 


preaching war sermons to his people ; but they were 
not men to flinch. They cared more for their country 
than for themselves, and it was precisely that kind 
of men throughout the land, from New England to 
Georgia, who won liberty for us by seven years of 
hard fighting and terrible suffering. 


THE CHARGE OF THE HOUHDS. 

AN INCIDENT OF THE CHEEK WAR. 

A terrible bit of news was carried from mouth to 
mouth through the region that is now Alabama at 
the beginning of September, 1813. The country was 
at that time in the midst of the second war with 
Great Britain, and for a long time British agents had 
been trying to persuade the Creeks — a powerful na- 
tion of half-civilized but very warlike Indians who 
lived in Alabama — to join in the war and destroy the 
white settlements in the Southwest. 

For some time the Creeks hesitated, and it was un- 
certain what they would do. But during the sum- 
mer of 1813 they broke out in hostility, and on the 
30th of August their great leader, Weatherford, or 
the Red Eagle, as they called him, stormed Fort 
Mims, the strongest fort in the Southwest. He took 


The Charge of the Hounds . 1 3 1 

the fort by surprise, with a thousand warriors behind 
him, and, after five hours of terrible fighting, de- 
stroyed it, killing about five hundred men, women, 
and children. 

This was the news that startled the settlers in the 
region where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers come 
together. It was certain, after such a massacre as that, 
that the Indians meant to destroy the settlements, 
and kill all the white people without mercy. 

In order to protect themselves and their families 
the settlers built rude forts by setting pieces of tim- 
ber endwise in the ground, and the people hurried to 
these places for safety. Leaving their homes to be 
burned, their crops to be destroyed, and their cattle 
to be killed or carried off by the Indians, the settlers 
hastily got together what food they could, and took 
their families into the nearest forts. 

One of the smallest of these stockade forts was 
called Sinquefield. It stood in what is now Clarke 
County, Alabama, and, as that region was very thinly 
settled, there were not enough men to make a strong 


132 Strange Stories from History . 

force for the defence of the fort. But the brave farm- 
ers and hunters thought they could hold the place, 
and so they took their families thither as quickly as 
they could. 

Two families, numbering seventeen persons, found it 
was not easy to go to Sinquefield on the 2d of Septem- 
ber, and so, as they were pretty sure that there were no 
Indians in their neighborhood as yet, they made up 
their minds to stay one more night at a house a few 
miles from the fort. That night they were attacked, 
and all but five of them were killed. Those who got 
away carried- the news of what had happened to the 
fort, and a party was sent out to bring in the bodies. 

The next day all the people in Fort Sinquefield 
went out to bury their dead friends in a valley at 
some little distance from the fort, and, strange as it 
seems, they took no arms with them. Believing that 
there were no Indians near the place, they left the 
gates of the fortress open, and went out in a body 
without their guns. 

As a matter of fact there was a large body of In- 


133 


The Charge of the Hounds . 

dians not only very near them, but actually looking 
at them all the time. The celebrated Prophet Fran- 
cis was in command, and in his sly way he had crept 
as near the fort as possible to look for a good chance 
to attack it. Making his men lie down and crawl 
like snakes, he had reached a point only a few hun- 
dred yards from the stockade without alarming the 
people, and now, while they stood around the graves 
of their friends without arms to defend themselves 
w T ith, a host of their savage enemies lay looking at 
them from the grass and bushes on the hill. 

As soon as he saw that the right moment had 
come, Francis sprang up with a savage war-cry, and 
at the head of his warriors made a dash at the gates. 
He had seen that the men outside were unarmed, and 
his plan was to get to the gates before they could 
reach them, and thus get all the people of the place 
at his mercy in an open field and without arms to 
fight with. 

The fort people were quick to see what his purpose 

was, and the men hurried forward with all their 
8 


134 Strange Stories from History . 

might, hoping to reach the fort before the savages 
could get there. By running at the top of their 
speed they did this, and closed the gates in time to 
keep the Indians out. But, to their horror, they then 
saw that their wives and children were shut out too. 
Unable to run so fast as the men had done, the wom- 
en and children had fallen behind, and now the In- 
dians were between them and the gates ! 

Seeing that he had missed his chance of getting 
possession of the fort, Francis turned upon the women 
and children with savage delight in the thought of 
butchering these helpless creatures in the sight of 
their husbands, fathers, and brothers. 

It was a moment of terror. There were not half 
enough white men in the fort to master so large a 
force of Indians, and if there had been it was easy to 
see that by the time they could get their rifles and 
go to the rescue it would be too late. 

At that moment the hero of this bit of history 
came upon the scene. This was a young man named 
Isaac Haden. He was a notable huntsman, who kept 


i35 


The Charge of the Hounds . 

a famous pack of hounds — fierce brutes, thoroughly 
trained to run down and seize any live thing that 
their master chose to chase. This young man had 
been out in search of stray cattle, and just at the mo- 
ment when matters were at their worst he rode up to 
the fort, followed by his sixty dogs. 

Isaac Haden had a cool head and a very daring 
spirit. He was in the habit of taking in a situation 
at a glance, deciding quickly what was to be done, 
and then doing it at any risk that might be neces- 
sary. As soon as he saw how the women and chil- 
dren were placed, he cried out to his dogs, and, at the 
head of the bellowing pack, charged upon the flank 
of the Indians. The dogs did their work with a spirit 
equal to their master’s. For each to seize a red war- 
rior and drag him to earth was the work of a mo- 
ment, and the whole body of savages was soon in 
confusion. For a time they had all they could do to 
defend themselves against the unlooked-for assault of 
the fierce animals, and before they could beat off the 
dogs the men of the fort came out and joined in the 


1 36 Strange Stories from History . 

attack, so that the women and children had time to 
make their way inside the gates, only one of them, a 
Mrs. Phillips, having been killed. 

The men, of course, had to follow the women close- 
ly, as they were much too weak in numbers to risk a 
battle outside. If they had done so the Indians 
would have overcome them quickly, and then the 
fort and everybody in it would have been at their 
mercy, so the settlers hurried into the fort as soon as 
the women were safe. 

But the hero who had saved the people by his 
quickness and courage was left outside, and not only 
so, but the savages were between him and the fort. 
He had charged entirely through the war party, and 
was now beyond their line, alone, and with no chance 
of help from any quarter. 

His hope of saving himself was very small indeed; 
but he had saved all those helpless women and little 
children, and he was a brave enough fellow to die will- 
ingly for such a purpose as that if he must. But brave 
men do not give up easily, and young Pladen did not 
mean to die without a last effort to save himself. 


JUST AT THE MOMENT WHEN MATTERS WERE AT THEIR WORST, HE RODE UP. 





The Charge of the Hounds . 139 

Blowing a loud blast upon his hunting-horn to 
call his remaining dogs around him, he drew his pis- 
tols — one in each hand — and plunged spurs into his 
horse’s flanks. In spite of the numbers against him 
he broke through the mass of savages, but the gal- 
lant horse that bore him fell dead as he cleared the 
Indian ranks. Haden had fired both his pistols, and 
had no time to load them again. He was practically 
unarmed now, and the distance he still had to go be- 
fore reaching the gates was considerable. His chance 
of escape seemed smaller than ever, but he quickly 
sprang from the saddle, and ran with all his might, 
hotly pursued, and under a terrific fire from the rifles 
of the savages. The gate was held a little way open 
for him to pass, and when he entered the fort his 
nearest pursuers were so close at his heels that there 
was barely time for the men to shut the gate in their 
faces. 

Strangely enough, the brave young fellow was not 
hurt in any way. Five bullets had passed through 
his clothes, but his skin was not broken. 


THE STORY OF A WINTER CAMPAIGN. 

Neakly all the countries in Europe were making 
war upon France in 1795. The French people had 
set up a republic, and all the kingdoms round about 
were trying to make them submit to a king again. 
This had been going on for several years, and some- 
times it looked as though the French would be beat- 
en, in spite of their brave struggles to keep their en- 
emies back and manage their own affairs in their own 
way. 

At one time everything went against the French. 
Their armies were worn out with fighting, their sup- 
ply of guns had run short, they had no powder, and 
their money matters were in so bad a state that it 
seemed hardly possible for France to hold out any 
longer. In the meantime England, Austria, Spain, 
Holland, Piedmont, and Prussia, besides many of the 


The Story of a Winter Campaign . 141 

small German states, had joined together to fight 
France, and their armies were on every side of her. 

A country in such a state as that, with so many 
powerful enemies on every side, might well have giv- 
en up ; but the French are a brave people, and they 
were fighting for their liberties. Instead of giving 
up in despair, they set to work with all their might 
to carry on the war. 

The first thing to be done was to raise new armies, 
and so they called for men, and the men came forward 
in great numbers from every part of the country. In 
a little while they had more men to make soldiers of 
than had ever before been brought together in France. 
But this was only a beginning. The men were not 
yet trained soldiers, and even if they had been, they 
had no guns and no powder; no clothing was to be 
had, and there was very little food for them to eat. 
Still the French did not despair. 

Knowing that there would not be time enough 
to train the new men, they put some of their old 
soldiers in each regiment of new ones, so that the 


142 Strange Stories from History . 

new men might learn from the veterans how to march 
and how to fight. 

In the meantime they had set up armories, and 
were making guns as fast as they could. Their great- 
est trouble was about powder. They had chemists 
who knew how to make it, but they had no nitre to 
make it of, and did not know at first how to get any. 
At last one of their chemists said that there was 
some nitre — from a few ounces to a pound or two — 
in the earth of every cellar floor; and that if all the 
nitre in all the cellar floors of France could be col- 
lected, it would be enough to make plenty of powder. 

But how to get this nitre was a question. The 
cellar floors must be dug up, the earth must be 
washed, and the water must be carefully passed 
through a course of chemical treatment in order to 
get the nitre, free from earth and from all other 
things with which it was mixed. It would take 
many days for a chemist to extract the nitre from the 
earth of a single cellar, and then he would get only a 
pound or two of it at most. 


The Story of a Winter Campaign. 143 

It did not seem likely that much could be done in 
this way, but all the people were anxious to help, and 
so the cry went up from every part of the country, 
“ Send us chemists to teach us how, and we will do 
the work and get the nitre ourselves.” This was 
quickly done. All the chemists were set at work 
teaching the people how to get a little nitre out of a 
great deal of earth, and then every family went to 
work. In a little while the nitre began to come in 
to the powder-factories. Each family sent its little 
parcel of the precious salt as a free gift to the coun- 
try. Some of them were so proud and glad of the 
chance to help that they dressed their little packages 
of nitre in ribbons of the national colors, and wrote 
patriotic words upon them. Each little parcel held 
only a few ounces, or at most a pound or two, of the 
white salt ; but the parcels came in by tens of thou- 
sands, and in a few weeks there were hundreds of 
tons of nitre at the powder-mills. 

As soon as there was powder enough the new ar- 
mies began to press their enemies, and, during the 


144 Strange Stories from History . 

summer and fall of 1794, they steadily drove them 
back. When they met their foes in battle they near- 
ly always forced them to give way. They charged 
upon forts and took them at the point of the bayonet; 
cities and towns everywhere fell into their hands, and 
by the time that winter set in they were so used to 
winning battles that nothing seemed too hard for 
them to undertake. 

But the French soldiers were in a very bad condi- 
tion to stand the cold of winter. One great army, 
under General Pichegru, which had driven the Eng- 
lish and Dutch far into the Netherlands, was really 
almost naked. The shoes of the soldiers were worn 
out, and so they had to wrap their feet in wisps of 
straw to keep them from freezing. Many of the men 
had not clothing enough to cover their nakedness, 
and, for decency’s sake, had to plait straw into mats 
which they wore around their shoulders like blank- 
ets. They had no tents to sleep in, but, nearly naked 
as they were, had to lie down in the snow or on the 
hard frozen ground, and sleep as well as they could 
in the bitter winter weather. 


H5 


The Story of a Winter Campaign . 

There never was an army more in need of a good 
rest in winter-quarters, and as two great rivers lay in 
front of them, it seemed impossible to do anything 
more until spring. The English and Dutch were al- 
ready safely housed for the winter, feeling perfectly 
sure that the French could not cross the rivers or 
marcli in any direction until the beginning of the 
next summer. 

The French generals, therefore, put their men into 
the best quarters they could get for them, and the 
poor, half-naked, barefooted soldiers were glad to 
think that their work for that year was done. 

Day by day the weather grew colder. The ground 
was frozen hard, and ice began running in the rivers. 
After a little while the floating ice became so thick 
that the rivers were choked with it. When Christ- 
mas came the stream nearest the French was frozen 
over, and three days later the ice was so hard that 
the surface of the river was as firm as the solid 
ground. 

Then came an order from General Pichegru to 


146 Strange Stories from History. 

shoulder arms and march. In the bitterest weather 
of that terrible winter the barefooted, half-clad French 
soldiers left their huts, and marched against their foes. 
Crossing the first river on the ice, they fell upon the 
surprised Dutch and utterly routed them. About 
the same time they made a dash at the strong forti- 
fied posts along the river, and captured them. 

The French were now masters of the large island 
that lay between the two rivers, for they are really 
only two branches of one river, and the land between 
them is an island. But the ice in the farther stream 
was not yet hard enough to bear the weight of can- 
non, so Pichegru had to stay where he was for a time. 
Both sides now watched the weather, the French hop- 
ing for still harder frosts, while their enemies prayed 
for a thaw. 

The cold weather continued, and day by day the 
ice became firmer. On the 8th of January, 1795, 
Pichegru began to cross, and on the 10th his whole 
army had passed the stream, while his enemies were 
rapidly retreating. He pushed forward into the 


147 


The Story of a Winter Campaign, 

country, sending his columns in different directions to 
press the enemy at every point. The barefooted, half- 
naked French soldiers were full of spirit, and in spite 
of frost and snow and rough frozen roads they marched 
steadily and rapidly. City after city fell before them, 
and on the 20th of January they marched into Am- 
sterdam itself, and were complete conquerors. 

Hungry and half-frozen as they were, it would not 
have been strange if these poor soldiers had rushed 
into the warm houses of the city and helped them- 
selves to food and clothing. But they did nothing 
of the kind. They stacked their arms in the streets 
and public squares, and quietly waited in the snow, 
patiently bearing the bitter cold of the wind for sev- 
eral hours, while the magistrates were getting houses 
and food and clothing ready for them. 

This whole campaign was wonderful, and on al- 
most every day some strange thing happened; but, 
perhaps, the strangest of all the events in this winter 
war was that which is shown in the picture. Piche- 
gru, learning that there was a fleet of the enemy’s ves- 


148 Strange Stories from History . 

sels lying at anchor near the island of Texel, sent a 
column of cavalry, with some cannon, in that direc- 
tion, to see if anything could be done. The cavalry 
found the Zuyder Zee hard frozen, and the ships firm- 
ly locked in the ice. So they put spurs to their 
horses, galloped over the frozen surface of the sea, 
marched up to the ships, and called on them to sur- 
render. It was a new thing in war for ships to be 
charged by men on horseback; but there the horse- 
men were, with strong ice under them, and the ships 
could not sail away from them. The sailors could 
make a fight, of course, but the cavalry, with their 
cannon, were too strong for them, and so they surren- 
dered without a battle, and for the first time in his- 
tory a body of hussars captured a squadron of ships 
at anchor. 


CAPTURE OF TIIE DUTCH FLEET BY THE SOLDIERS OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC 



| 

I 










YOUNG WASHINGTON IN THE WOODS. 

THE STORY OF A PERILOUS JOURNEY. 

No man ever lived whose name is more honored 
than that of George Washington, and no man ever 
deserved his fame more. All the success that ever 
came to him was won by hard work. He succeeded 
because he was the kind of man that he was, and not 
in the least because he had “ a good chance ” to dis- 
tinguish himself. He never owed anything to “ good 
luck,” nor even to a special education in the business 
of a soldier. Some men are called great because they 
have succeeded in doing great things; but he suc- 
ceeded in doing great things because he was great in 
himself. 

Everybody who knew him, even as a boy, seems to 
have respected as well as liked him. There was 
something in his character which made men think 


1 5 2 Strange Stories from History . 

well of him. When he was only sixteen years of age 
Lord Fairfax admired him to such a degree that he 
appointed him to a post which not many men would 
have been trusted to fill. He put the boy at the 
head of a surveying party, and sent him across the 
mountains to survey the valley of Virginia — a vast 
region which was then unsettled. So well did Wash- 
ington perform this difficult and dangerous task that 
a few years later, when he was only twenty-one years 
old, the Governor of Virginia picked him out for a 
more delicate and dangerous piece of work. 

The English colonies lay along the Atlantic coast, 
while the French held Canada. The country west 
of the Alleghany Mountains, which we now know as 
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc., was claimed by both the 
French and the English, though only the Indians 
lived there. The French made friends of the savages, 
and began building forts at different points in that 
region, and putting soldiers there ;o keep the English 
away. The Governor of Virginia wanted to put a 
stop to this, and so he resolved to send a messenger 


Young Washington in the Woods. 153 

into “the Great Woods/’ as the western country was 
called, to warn the French off, and to win the friend- 
ship of the Indians if possible. 

For such a service he needed a man with a cool 
head, good sense, great courage, and, above all, what 
boys call “ grit for whoever should go would have 
to make his way for many hundreds of miles through 
a trackless wilderness, over mountains and rivers, and 
among hostile Indians. Young Washington had al- 
ready shown what stuff he was made of, and, young 
as he was, he was regarded as a remarkable man. 
The governor therefore picked him out as the very 
best person for the work that was to be done. 

It was November when Washington set out, and the 
weather was very cold and wet. He took four white 
men and two Indians with him, the white men being 
hunters who knew how to live in the woods. As the 
country they had to pass through was a wilderness, 
they had to carry air their supplies with them on pack- 
horses. They rode all day through the woods, and 

when night came slept in little tents by some spring 
9 


154 Strange Stories from History . 

or watercourse. Day after day they marched forward, 
until at last they reached an Indian village, near the 
spot where Pittsburgh now stands, and there they 
halted to make friends with the Indians. 

This was not very easy, as the French had already 
had a good deal to do with the tribes in that region ; 
but Washington persuaded the chief, whose name was 
Tanacharisson, to go with him to visit the French 
commander, who was stationed in a fort hundreds of 
miles away, near Lake Erie. 

This march, like the other, was slow and full of 
hardships; but at last the fort was reached, and 
Washington delivered his message to the French 
officer. A day or two later the Frenchman gave him 
his answer, which was that the western country be- 
longed to the French, and that they had no notion 
of giving it up. 

All the trouble Washington had met in going north 
was nothing compared with what was before him in 
going back to Virginia again. The winter was now 
at its worst, and the weather was terrible. The rivers 


Young Washington in the Woods. 155 

and creeks were full of floating ice, and the woods 
were banked high with snow. But Washington was 
not to be daunted by any kind of difficulty. He set 
out on his return march, and with the aid of canoes, 
in which his baggage was carried down a small 
stream that ran in that direction, he took his party 
as far as Venango, in the northwestern part of Penn- 
sylvania. 

There he found that he could go no farther on 
horseback. The ground was frozen on top, but soft 
beneath, and the poor horses broke through the hard 
crust at every step. There was a French fort at Ve- 
nango, and Washington might have waited there 
very comfortably for better weather ; but it was his 
duty to get back to Virginia as soon as possible with 
the French commander’s answer, and so he made up 
his mind to go on, even at the risk of his life. 

Leaving the rest of the party to come when they 
could with the horses, Washington and a single com- 
panion named Gist set out on foot for the long winter 
march. As they had no pack-horses to carry tents 


156 Strange Stories from History, 

and cooking-vessels and food, they had to leave every- 
thing behind except what they could carry on their 
backs ; and as they were obliged to take their rifles, 
powder-horns, and bullet - pouches, their hunting- 
knives and hatchets, and a blanket apiece, they were 
pretty heavily loaded, and could not afford to burden 
themselves with much else. 

Day by day the two brave fellows trudged on 
through the snow-drifts, sleeping at night as best 
they could, exposed to the biting cold of the winter, 
without shelter, except such as the woods afforded. 
There were other dangers besides cold and hunger. 
At one time a treacherous Indian, who had offered to 
act as guide, tried to lead the two white men into a 
trap. As they suspected his purpose, they refused 
to do as he wished, and a little later he suddenly 
turned about and shot at Washington, who was only 
a few paces distant. Missing his aim, he was quickly 
overpowered, and Gist wanted to kill him, not merely 
because he deserved to be put to death for his treach- 
ery, but also because, if allowed to go free, he was 



WASHINGTON AS A SURVEYOR. 
















































































































































































































' 






































' 
















• . 























































































































Young Washington in the Woods . 159 

pretty sure to bring other hostile Indians to attack 
the lonely travellers during the night. 

But Washington would not have him killed. He 
made him build a camp-fire, and then told him to 
leave them at once. The Indian did so, and as soon 
as it was certain that he was out of sight and hear- 
ing the two young men set out to make their escape. 
They knew the Indian would soon come back with 
others, and that their only chance for life was to push 
on as fast as they could. The Indians could track 
them in the snow, but by setting out at once they 
hoped to get so far ahead that they could not be 
easily overtaken. 

It was already night, and the travellers were weary 
from their day’s march, but they could not afford to 
stop or rest. All through the night they toiled on. 
Morning came, and they must have felt it nearly im- 
possible to drag their weary feet farther, but still 
they made no halt. On and on they went, and it 
was not till nigbt came again that they thought it 
safe at last to stop for the rest and sleep they needed 


160 Strange Stories from History . 

so badly. The strain they had undergone must have 
been fearful. They were already weary and way- 
worn when they first met the treacherous Indian, and 
after that they had toiled through the snow for two 
days and a night without stopping to rest or daring 
to refresh themselves with sleep. 

Just before reaching their journey’s end they ar- 
rived at the brink of a river which they expected to 
find frozen over ; but they found it full of floating ice 
instead. Without boat or bridge, there seemed no 
chance of getting across ; but after a while they man- 
aged to make a rude raft, and upon this they under- 
took to push themselves across with long poles. 

The current was very strong, the raft was hard to 
manage, and the great fields of ice forced it out of its 
course. In trying to push it in the right direction, 
Washington missed his footing and fell into the icy 
river. His situation was very dangerous, but by a 
hard struggle he got upon the floating logs again. 
Still the current swept them along, and they could 
not reach either shore of the stream. 


Young Washington in the Woods . 161 

At last they managed to leap from the logs, not to 
the bank, but to a small island in the river. There 
they were very little better off than on the raft. They 
were on land, it is true, but there was still no way of 
getting to shore; and as there was nothing on the 
island to make a fire with, Washington was forced, 
drenched as he was with ice-water, to pass the long 
winter night in the open air, without so much as a 
tiny blaze or a handful of coals by which to warm 
himself. 

Unfortunately the night proved to be a very cold 
one, and poor Gist’s feet and hands were frozen before 
morning. Washington got no frost-bites, but his suf- 
ferings must have been great. 

During the night that part of the stream which lay 
between the island and the shore that Washington 
wished to reach froze over, and in the morning the 
travellers were able to renew their journey. Once 
across that, the worst of their troubles were over. 

Is it any wonder that a young man who did his 
duty in this way rapidly rose to distinction ? He was 


1 62 Strange Stories from History . 

always in earnest in his work, and always did it with 
all his might. He never shammed or shirked. He 
never let his own comfort or his own interest stand in 
the way when there was a duty to be done. He was 
a great man before he became a celebrated one, and 
the wisest men in the country found out the fact. 

"When the revolution came there were other soldiers 
older and better known than Washington, but there 
were men in Congress who had watched his career 
carefully. They made him, therefore, commander-in- 
chief of the American armies, knowing that nobody 
else was so sure to do the very best that could be 
done for the country. They did not make him a 
great man by appointing him to the chief command ; 
they appointed him because they knew he was a 
great man already. 


THE STORY OF CATHERINE. 


Peter the Great, the emperor who, in a few years, 
changed Russia from a country of half-savage tribes 
into a great European nation, was one day visiting 
one of his officers, and saw in his house a young girl, 
who attracted his attention by her beauty and her 
graceful manners. This girl was a prisoner named 
Martha, and she was living as a sort of servant and 
housekeeper in the family of the Russian officer. She 
had been taken prisoner when the town she lived in 
was captured. Nobody knows, even to this day, ex- 
actly who she was, except that she was a poor orphan 
girl who had been brought up by a village clergy- 
man ; but it is generally believed that her father was 
a Livonian peasant. 

Martha’s beauty and the brightness of her mind 
pleased the emperor so much that, after a while, he 


164 Strange Stories from History. 

made up his mind to marry her, in spite of her hum- 
ble origin. Peter was in the habit of doing pretty 
much as he pleased, whether his nobles liked it or 
not; but even he dared not make a captive peasant 
girl the Empress of Russia. He therefore married 
her privately, in the presence of a few of his nearest 
friends, who were charged to keep the secret. Before 
the marriage took place he had Martha baptized in 
the Russian Church, and changed her name to Cath- 
erine. 

Now Peter had a bad habit of losing his temper? 
and getting so angry that he fell into fits. As he 
was an absolute monarch and could do whatever he 
liked, it was very dangerous for anybody to go near 
him when he was angry. He could have a head 
chopped off as easily as he could order his breakfast. 
But he was very fond of Catherine, and she was the 
only person who was not in the least afraid of him. 
She soon learned how to manage him, and even in his 
worst fits she could soothe and quiet the old bear. 

Peter was nearly always at war, and in spite of the 


The Story of Catherine . 165 

hardships and dangers of the camp and battle-field 
Catherine always marched with him at the head of 
the army. The soldiers wondered at her bravery, and 
learned to like her more than anybody else. If food 
was scarce, the roads rough, and the marches long, 
they remembered that Catherine was with them, and 
were ashamed to grumble. If she could stand the 
hardships and face the dangers, they thought rough 
soldiers ought not to complain. 

Catherine was a wise woman as well as a brave 
one. She soon learned as much of the art of war as 
Peter knew, and in every time of doubt or difficulty 
her advice was asked, and her opinion counted for as 
much as if she had been one of the generals. After 
she had thus shown how able a woman she was, and 
had won the friendship of everybody about her by 
her good temper and her pleasant ways, Peter pub- 
licly announced his marriage, and declared Catherine 
to be his wife and czarina. But still he did not 
crown her. 

This was in the year 1711, and immediately after- 


1 66 Strange Stories from History . 

wards Peter marched into the Turkish country at the 
head of forty thousand men. This army was not 
nearly large enough to meet the Turks, but Peter had 
other armies in different places, and had ordered all of 
them to meet him on the march. For various reasons 
all these armies failed to join him, and he found him- 
self in a Turkish province with a very small number 
of troops. The danger was so great that he ordered 
Catherine and all the other women to go back to a 
place of safety. But Catherine would not go. She 
had made up her mind to stay with Peter at the head 
of the army, and was so obstinate about it that at 
last Peter gave her leave to remain. Then the wives 
of the generals, and, finally, of the lower officers, want- 
ed to stay also. She persuaded Peter to let them do 
so, and the end of it was that the women all stayed 
with the army. 

Everything went against Peter on this march. The 
weather was very dry. Swarms of locusts were in the 
country, eating every green thing. There was no food 
for the horses, and many of them starved to death. 


i6y 


The Story of Catherine . 

It was hard for the Russians to go forward or to go 
backward, and harder still to stay where they were. 

At last the soldiers in front reported that the 
Turks were corning, and Peter soon saw a great army 
of two hundred thousand fierce Moslems in front of 
his little force, which counted up only thirty-eight 
thousand men. Seeing the odds against him he gave 
the order to retreat, and the army began its backward 
march. As it neared the river Pruth a new danger 
showed itself. The advance-guard brought word 
that a great force of savage Crim Tartars held the 
other bank of the river, completely cutting off Peter’s 
retreat. 

The state of things seemed hopeless. With two 
hundred thousand Turks on one side, and a strong 
force of Crim Tartars holding a river on the other, 
Peter’s little army was completely hemmed in. There 
was no water in the camp, and when the soldiers 
went to the river for it, the Tartars on the other shore 
kept up a fierce fight with them. A great horde of 
Turkish cavalry tried hard to cut off the supply en- 


1 68 Strange Stories from History . 

\ 

tirely by pushing themselves between Peter’s camp 
and the river, but the Russians managed to keep 
them back by hard fighting, and to keep a road open 
to the river. 

Peter knew now that unless help should come to 
him in some shape, and that very quickly, he must 
lose not only his army, but his empire also, for if the 
Turks should take him prisoner, it was certain that his 
many enemies would soon conquer Russia, and divide 
the country among themselves. He saw no chance 
of help coming, but he made up his mind to fight as 
long as he could. He formed his men in a hollow 
square, with the women in the middle, and faced his 
enemies. 

The Turks flung themselves in great masses upon 
his lines, trying to crush the little force of Russians 
by mere numbers. But Peter’s brave men remem- 
bered that Catherine was inside their hollow square, 
and they stood firmly at their posts, driving back the 
Turks with frightful slaughter. Again and again 
and again they fell upon his lines in heavy masses, 


The Story of Catherine . 1 69 

and again and again and again they were driven back, 
leaving the field black with their dead. 

This could not go on forever, of course, and both 
sides saw what the end must be. As the Turks had 
many times more men than Peter, it was plain that 
they would, at last, win by destroying all the Rus- 
sians. 

For three days and nights the terrible slaughter 
went on. Peter’s men beat back the Turks at every 
charge, but every hour their line grew thinner. At 
the end of the third day sixteen thousand of their 
brave comrades lay dead upon the field, and only 
twenty-two thousand remained to face the enemy. 

Towards night on the third day a terrible rumor 
spread through their camp. A whisper ran along the 
line that the ammunition was giving out . A few 
more shots from each soldier’s gun, and there would 
be nothing left to fight with. 

Then Peter fell into the sulks. As long as he could 
fight he had kept up his spirits, but now that all was 
lost, and his great career seemed near its end, he grew 


170 


Strange Stories from History . 


angry, and went to his tent to have one of his savage 
fits. He gave orders that nobody should come near 
him, and there was no officer or soldier in all the 
army who would have dared enter the tent where 
he lay, in his dangerous mood. 

But if Peter had given up in despair, Catherine 
had not. In spite of Peter’s order and his anger, she 
boldly went into his tent, and asked him to give her 
leave to put an end to the war by making a treaty 
of peace with the Turks, if she could. It seemed ab- 
surd to talk of such a thing, or to expect the Turks 
to make peace on any terms when they had so good 
a chance to conquer Peter, once for all, and to make 
him their prisoner. Nobody but Catherine, perhaps, 
would have thought of such a thing; but Catherine 
was a woman born for great affairs, and she had no 
thought of giving up any chance there might be to 
save Peter and the empire. 

Her first difficulty was with Peter himself. She 
could not offer terms of peace to the Turks until Pe- 
ter gave her leave, and promised to fulfil whatever 



i < 


)> 


SHE WENT BOLDLY INTO HIS TENT 












































► 

































































































































. 









































































The Story of Catherine. 


173 


bargain she might make with them. She managed 
this part of the matter, and then set to work at the 
greater task of dealing with the Turks. 

She knew that the Turkish army was under the 
command of the Grand Vizier, and she knew some- 
thing of the ways of Grand Viziers. It was not worth 
while to send any kind of messenger to a Turkish 
commander without sending him also, a bribe in the 
shape of a present, and Catherine was sure that the 
bribe must be a very large one to buy the peace 
she wanted. But where was she to get the present ? 
There was no money in Peter’s army-chest, and no 
way of getting any from Russia. Catherine .was not 
discouraged by that fact. She first got together all 
her own jewels, and then went to all the officers’ 
wives and asked each of them for whatever she had 
that was valuable — money, jewels, and plate. She 
gave each of them a receipt for what she took, and 
promised to pay them the value of their goods when 
she should get back to Moscow. She went in this 
way throughout the camp, and got together all the 
10 


1 74 Strange Stories from History. 

money, all the jewelry, and all the silver plate that 
were to be found in the army. No one person had 
much, of course ; but when the things were collected 
together, they made a very rich present, or bribe, for 
the Grand Vizier. 

With this for a beginning, Catherine soon convinced 
the Turkish commander that it was better to make 
peace with Russia than to run the risk of having to 
fight the great armies that were already marching 
towards Turkey. After some bargaining she secured 
a treaty which allowed Peter to go back to Russia in 
safety, and thus she saved the czar and the empire. 
A few years later Peter crowned her as Empress of 
Russia, and when he died he named her as the fittest 
person to be his successor on the throne. 

Thus the peasant girl of Livonia, who was made a 
captive in war and a servant, rose by her genius and 
courage to be the sole ruler of a great empire — the 
first woman who ever reigned over Russia. It is a 
strange but true story. 


THE VIRGINIA WIFE -MARKET. 

TWO SHIPLOADS OF SWEETHEARTS AND THE PRICES PAID FOR 
THEM. 

The first English settlement in America that came 
to anything was made in the most absurd way possi- 
ble. A great company of London merchants set 
about the work of planting an English colony in Vir- 
ginia, and they were very much in earnest about it 
too; but if they had been as anxious to have the 
scheme fail as they were to make it succeed, they 
could hardly have done worse for it than they did in 
some respects. 

They knew that the colonists must have something 
to eat and must defend themselves against the In- 
dians, and so it ought to have been plain to them that 
the first men sent out must be stout farmers, who 
could cut down trees, plough the ground, raise food 


1 76 Strange Stories from History. 

enough for the people to eat, and handle guns well, 
if need be. The work to be done was that of farm- 
ers, wood-choppers, and men who could make a liv- 
ing for themselves in a new country, and common- 
sense ought to have led the London Company to send 
out nobody but men of that kind to make the first 
settlement. Then, after those men had cleared some 
land, built some houses, and raised their first crop, 
men of other kinds might have been sent as fast as 
there was need for their services. 

But that was not the way in which the London 
Company went to work. They chose for their first 
settlers about the most unfit men they could have 
found for such a purpose. There were one hundred 
and five of them in all, and forty-eight of them — or 
nearly half of the whole company — were what people 
in those days called “gentlemen” — that is to say, 
they were the sons of rich men. They had never 
learned how to do any kind of work, and had been 
brought up to think that a gentleman could not work 
without degrading himself and losing his right to be 


The Virginia Wife-Market . 177 

called a gentleman. There were a good many “ser- 
vants” also in the party, and probably most of 
them were brought to wait upon the gentlemen. 
There were very few farmers and not many me- 
chanics in the party, although farmers and mechan- 
ics were the men most needed. There were some 
goldsmiths, who expected to work the gold as soon 
as the colonists should find it, and there was a per- 
fume-maker. It is hard to say in what way this 
perfume-man was expected to make himself useful in 
the work of planting a settlement in the swamps of 
Virginia; but, as there were so many fine “gentle- 
men ” in the party, the perfumer probably thought 
his wares would be in demand. 

None of the men brought families with them. 
They were single men, who came out to this country, 
not to make comfortable homes for wives and chil- 
dren, by hard and patient work, but to find gold and 
pearls, or to grow rich in some other quick and easy 
way, and then to go back and live in ease in England. 

It is a wonder that such men ever succeeded in 


178 Strange Stories from History . 

planting a settlement at all. From the first it does 
not seem to have been clear to them that they ought 
to raise plenty of food for themselves and learn how 
to live by their own work. They expected the com- 
pany in London to send them most of their food and 
everything else that they needed. They had plenty 
of rich land and a good climate, but they expected to 
be fed by people three thousand miles away, across a 
great ocean. 

Luckily, there was one man of sense and spirit 
among them — the celebrated Captain John Smith — 
who got them to w r ork a little, and, after many hard- 
ships and two or three narrow escapes from failure, 
the colony was firmly planted. 

The London Company sent out ships every year 
with supplies and fresh colonists; but, strange as it 
seems, most of the men sent were unmarried, and 
even those who had wives and children left them in 
England. 

When we think of it, this was a very bad way to 
begin the work of settling a new country. The bach- 


1 79 


The Virginia Wife-Market . 

elors, of course, did not intend to stay all tlieir lives 
in a country where there were no women and chil- 
dren. They meant to make some money as quickly 
as they could and then go back to England to live. 
The married men who had left their families behind 
them were in still greater haste to make what they 
could and go home. In short, for a dozen years after 
the colony was planted, nobody thought of it as his 
real home, where he meant to live out his life. If 
the colonists had been married men, with wives and 
children in Virginia, they would have done all they 
could to make the new settlement a pleasant one to 
live in : they would have built good houses, set up 
schools, and worked hard to improve their own fort- 
unes and to keep order in the colony. 

But year after year the ships brought cargoes of 
single men to Virginia, and the settlement was scarce- 
ly more than a camp in the woods. After the compa- 
ny had been trying for a good many years to people a 
new country by landing shiploads of bachelors on its 
shores, it began to dawn upon their minds that if the 


180 Strange Stories from History . 

Virginia settlement was ever to grow into a thriving 
and lasting colony, there must be women and children 
there to make happy homes, as well as men to raise 
wheat, corn, and tobacco. 

Sir Edwin Sandys was the wise man who saw all 
this most clearly. He urged the company to send 
out hard-working married men, who would take their 
wives and children with them to Virginia and settle 
there for good. But this was not all. There were 
already a great many bachelors in the colony, and 
there were no young women there for them to marry. 
Sir Edwin knew that if these bachelors were to stay 
in Virginia and become prosperous colonists they 
must have a chance to marry and set up homes of 
their own. So he went to work in England to get 
together a cargo of sweethearts for the colonists. He 
persuaded ninety young women of good character to 
go out in one of the company’s ships, to marry young 
men in Virginia. 

The plan was an odd one, but it was managed 
with good sense and did well for everybody con- 


The Virginia Wife-Market . 181 

cerned. It was agreed that the company should 
provide the young women with such clothing and 
other things as they would need for the voyage, 
and should give them free passage on board the ship. 
When they landed in Virginia they were to be per- 
fectly free to marry or not, as they pleased. If any 
of them did not at once find husbands to their liking 
they were to be provided for in good homes until 
they chose to marry. 

But no man could marry one of these young wom- 
en without paying for her in tobacco, which was used 
instead of money in Virginia. The girls were not to 
be sold, exactly, but it was expected that each colonist 
who married one of them should pay the company as 
much as it had spent in bringing her across the ocean. 

And the men of the colony were glad enough to 
do this. When the shipload of sweethearts landed 
at Jamestown a large number of men who were tired 
of bachelor life hurried to the wharf to get wives for 
themselves if they could. They went among the 
young maids, introduced themselves, got acquainted, 


182 


Strange Stories from History. 


and did all the courting that was necessary in a very 
little time. The young women were honest, good, 
well-brought-up girls, and among the many men 
there were plenty of good, industrious, and brave fel- 
lows who wanted good wives, and so all the girls 
were “engaged” at once. The men paid down one 
hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco apiece — for 
that was the price fixed upon — and, as there was 
nothing to wait for, the clergymen were sent for and 
the weddings took place immediately. 

It was an odd thing to do, of course, but the cir- 
cumstances were very unusual, and the plan of import- 
ing sweethearts by the cargo really seems to have been 
a very good one. It must have been a strange sight 
when the girls landed and met the men who had 
come to the town to woo and marry them. And 
many of the girls must have felt that they took great 
risks in coming three thousand miles from home and 
marrying men whom they had known for so short a 
time ; but it seems that the marriages were happy 
ones, in spite of the haste in which they were made. 


i»3 


The Virginia Wife-Market . 

The newly-married pairs went to work in earnest to 
create good homes for themselves, and when their 
English .friends learned from their letters how happy 
and prosperous they were, another company of sixty 
sweethearts set sail for the colony and became the 
wives of good men. 

It was in this way that the English camp at James- 
town was changed into a real colony of people who 
meant to live in America and to build up a thriving 
community here. Now that the men had wives and 
children to provide for, they no longer lived “from 
hand to mouth,” hoping to make a fortune by some 
lucky stroke, and then to leave the colony forever. 
They went to work, instead, to cultivate the land, to 
build good houses, to make and save money, to edu- 
cate their children, and to become prosperous and 
happy in their homes. Virginia, which had been a 
mere stopping - place to them, was now their own 
country, where their families lived and their nearest 
friends were around them. There they expected to 
pass their lives in efforts to better their own fortunes, 


184 Strange Stories from History. 

and to make the country a pleasant one for their chil- 
dren and grandchildren after them to live in. They 
were anxious to have schools and churches, and to 
keep up right standards of morals and proper man- 
ners in the colony, so that their children might grow 
to be good and happy men and women. 

That is the way in which the first English colony 
in America became prosperous, and many of the men 
who afterwards became famous in the history of 
the nation were the great - great - grandsons of the 
women whom Sir Edwin Sandys sent out as sweet- 
hearts for the colonists. 

The Pilgrims, who settled at Plymouth about the 
time that all this happened, brought their families 
with them, and quickly made themselves at home in 
America. The planting of these two colonies — the 
first in Virginia and the second in Massachusetts — 
was the beginning from which our great, free, and 
happy country, with its fifty millions of people, has 
grown. 


THE BURGHERS PREPARE TO DEFEND THEIR CITY. 


1 








THE BOYHOOD OF DANIEL WEBSTER * 


Daniel Webster, the great statesman, orator, and 
lawyer, was born on the 18th of January, 1782. 

His father lived near the head- waters of the Mer- 
rimac River, and the only school within reach was a 
poor one kept open for a few months every winter. 
There Webster learned all that the country school- 
master could teach him, which was very little; but 
he acquired a taste which did more for him than the 
reading, writing, and arithmetic of the school. He 
learned to like books, and to want knowledge; and 
when a boy gets really hungry and thirsty for knowl- 
edge it is not easy to keep him ignorant. When 
some of the neighbors joined in setting up a little 

* For some of the materials used in this sketch I am indebted to the 
work entitled “ The Boyhood of Great Men,” by John G. Edgar, pub- 
lished by Messrs. Harper & Brothers. 


1 86 Strange Stories from History . 

circulating library, young Webster read every book 
in it two or three times, and even committed to mem- 
ory a large part of the best of them. It was this 
eagerness for education on his part that led his father 
afterwards to send him to Exeter to school, and later 
to put him into Dartmouth College. 

There are not many boys in our time who have not 
declaimed parts of Webster’s great speeches; and it 
will interest them to know that the boy who after- 
wards made those speeches could never declaim at all 
while he was at school. He learned his pieces well, 
and practised them in his own room, but he could 
not speak them before people to save his life. 

Webster was always fond of shooting and fishing, 
and, however hard he studied, the people around him 
called him lazy and idle, because he would spend 
whole days in these sports. Once, while he was 
studying under Dr. Woods to prepare for college, 
that gentleman spoke to him on the subject, and hurt 
his feelings a little. The boy went to his room deter- 
mined to have revenge, and this is the way he took 


The Boyhood of Da 7 iiel Webster. 187 

to get it. The usual Latin lesson was one hundred 
lines of Virgil, but Webster spent the whole night 
over the book. The next morning before breakfast 
he went to Dr. Woods and read the whole lesson cor- 
rectly. Then he said : 

“ Will you hear a few more lines, doctor 

The teacher consenting, Webster read on and on 
and on, while the breakfast grew cold. Still there 
was no sign of the boy’s stopping, and the hungry 
doctor at last asked how much farther he was pre- 
pared to read. 

“To the end of the twelfth book of the ^Eneid,” 
answered the “ idle ” boy, in triumph. 

After that, Webster did not give up his hunting 
and fishing, but he worked so hard at his lessons, and 
got on so fast, that there was no further complaint of 
his “idleness.” He not only learned the lessons 
given to him, but more, every day, and besides this 
he read every good book he could lay his hands on, 
for he was not at all satisfied to know only what 
could be found in the school-books. 


1 88 Strange Stories from History. 

Webster’s father was poor and in debt, but finding 
how eager his boy was for education, and seeing, 
too, that he possessed unusual ability, he determined, 
ill as he could afford the expense, to send him to col- 
lege. Accordingly, young Daniel went to Dartmouth. 

Many anecdotes are told to illustrate the character 
of young Dan. He was always lavish of his money 
when he had any, while his brother was careful but 
generous, especially to Dan, whom he greatly admired. 
On one occasion the boys went to a neighboring town 
on a high holiday, each with a quarter of a dollar in 
his pocket. 

“Well, Dan,” said the father on their return, “what 
did you do with your money?” 

“ Spent it,” answered the boy. 

“ And what did you do with yours, Zeke?” 

“ Lent it to Dan,” was the answer. The fact was 
that Dan had spent both quarters. 

Young Webster was very industrious in his studies, 
as we have seen, and he was physically strong and 
active, as his fondness for sport proved ; but he could 



TO TITE END OF THE TWELFTH BOOK OF THE iENEID,’ ANSWERED 
THE ‘IDLE’ BOY, IN TRIUMPH.” 



The Boyhood of Daniel Webster. 191 

never endure farm-work. One day his father wanted 
him to help him in cutting hay with a scythe; but 
very soon the boy complained that the scythe was 
not “ hung ” to suit him ; that is to say, it was not set 
at a .proper angle upon its handle. The old gentle- 
man adjusted it, but still it did not suit the boy. 
After repeated attempts to arrange it to Dan’s lik- 
ing, the father said, impatiently, “ Well, hang it to 
suit yourself.” And young Dan immediately “hung” 
it over a branch of an apple-tree and- left it there. 
That was the hanging which pleased him. 

After finishing his college course Webster began 
studying law, but having no money, and being un- 
willing to tax his father for further support, he went 
into Northern Maine, and taught school there for a 
time. While teaching he devoted his evenings to the 
work of copying deeds and other legal documents, 
and by close economy managed to live upon the 
money thus earned, thus saving the whole of his 
salary as a teacher. With this money to live on, he 

went to Boston, studied law, and soon distinguished 
11 


192 Strange Stories from History . 

himself. The story of his life as a public man, in 
the senate, in the cabinet, and at the bar, is well 
known, and does not belong to this sketch of his 
boyhood. 


THE SCULLION WHO BECAME A SCULPTOR. 


In the little Italian village of Possagno there lived 
a jolly stone-cutter named Pisano. He was poor, of 
course, or he would not have been a stone-cutter ; but 
he was full of good-humor, and everybody liked him. 

There was one little boy, especially, who loved old 
Pisano, and whom old Pisano loved more than any- 
body else in the world. This was Antonio Canova, 
Pisano’s grandson, who had come to live with him, 
because his father was dead, and his mother had mar- 
ried a harsh man, who treated the little Antonio 
roughly. 

Antonio was a frail little fellow, and his grandfa- 
ther liked to have him near him during his working 
hours. 

While Pisano worked at stone-cutting, little Cano- 
va played at it and at other things, such as modelling 


194 Strange Stories from History . 

in clay, drawing, etc. The old grandfather, plain, un- 
educated man as he was, soon discovered that the 
pale-faced little fellow at his side had something 
more than an ordinary child’s dexterity at such 
things. 

The boy knew nothing of art or of its laws, but he 
fashioned his lumps of clay into forms of real beauty. 
His wise grandfather, seeing what this indicated, hired 
a teacher to give him some simple lessons in drawing, 
so that he might improve himself if he really had the 
artistic ability which the old man suspected. Pisano 
was much too poor, as he knew, ever to give the boy 
an art-education and make an artist of him, but he 
thought that Antonio might at least learn to be a 
better stone-cutter than common. 

As the boy grew older he began to help in the shop 
during the day, while in the evening his grandmother 
told him stories or sang or recited poetry to him. 
All these things were educating him, though without 
his knowing it, for they were awakening his taste and 
stimulating his imagination, which found expression 


The Scullion who Became a Sculptor . 195 

in the clay models that lie loved to make in his leis- 
ure hours. 

It so happened that Signor Faliero, the head of a 
noble Venetian family, and a man of rare understand- 
ing in art, had a place near Pisano’s house, and at cer- 
tain seasons the nobleman entertained many distin- 
guished guests there. When the palace was very full 
of visitors, old Pisano was sometimes hired to help 
the servants w 7 ith their tasks, and the boy Canova, 
when he was twelve years old, sometimes did scul- 
lion’s work there, also, for a day, when some great 
feast was given. 

On one of these occasions, when the Signor Faliero 
was to entertain a very large company at dinner, 
young Canova was at work over the pots and pans 
in the kitchen. The head-servant made his appear- 
ance, just before the dinner hour, in great distress. 

The man who had been engaged to furnish the 
great central ornament for the table had, at the last 
moment, sent word that he had spoiled the piece. It 
was now too late to secure another, and there was 


196 Strange Stories from History. 

nothing to take its place. The great vacant space in 
the centre of the table spoiled the effect of all that 
had been done to make the feast artistic in appear- 
ance, and it was certain that Signor Faliero would be 
sorely displeased. 

But what was to be done ? The poor fellow whose 
business it was to arrange the table was at his wits’ 
end. 

While every one stood dismayed and wondering, 
the begrimed scullion boy timidly approached the 
distressed head-servant, and said, 

“ If you will let me try, I think I can make some- 
thing that will do.” 

“ You !” exclaimed the servant ; “and who are you?” 

“I am Antonio Canova, Pisano’s grandson,” an- 
swered the pale-faced little fellow. 

“ And what can you do, pray ?” asked the man, in 
astonishment at the conceit of the lad. 

“ I can make you something that will do for the 
middle of the table,” said the boy, “ if you’ll let me 
try.” 


The Scullion who Became a Sculptor. 197 

The servant had little faith in the boy’s ability, but 
not knowing what else to do, he at last consented 
that Canova should try. 

Calling for a large quantity of butter, little Anto- 
nio quickly modelled a great crouching lion, which 
everybody in the kitchen pronounced beautiful, and 
which the now rejoicing head-servant placed carefully 
upon the table. 

The company that day consisted of the most culti- 
vated men of Venice — merchants, princes, noblemen, 
artists, and lovers of art — and among them were many 
who, like Faliero himself, were skilled critics of art- 
work. 

When these people were ushered in to dinner their 
eyes fell upon the butter lion, and they forgot for 
what purpose they had entered the dining-room. 
They saw there something of higher worth in their 
eyes than any dinner could be, namely, a work of 
genius. 

They scanned the butter lion critically, and then 
broke forth in a torrent of praises, insisting that Fa- 


1 98 Strange Stories from History. 

liero should tell them at once what great sculptor he 
had persuaded to waste his skill upon a work in but- 
ter, that must quickly melt away. But Signor Faliero 
was as ignorant as they, and he had, in his turn, to 
make inquiry of the chief servant. 

When the company learned that the lion was the 
work of a scullion, Faliero summoned the boy, and 
the banquet became a sort of celebration in his honor. 

But it was not enough to praise a lad so gifted. 
These were men who knew that such genius as his 
belonged to the world, not to a village, and it was 
their pleasure to bring it to perfection by educating 
the boy in art. Signor Faliero himself claimed the 
right to provide for young Antonio, and at once de- 
clared his purpose to defray the lad’s expenses, and 
to place him under the tuition of the best masters. 

The boy whose highest ambition had been to be- 
come a village stone-cutter, and whose home had been 
in his poor old grandfather’s cottage, became at once 
a member of Signor Faliero’s family, living in his pal- 
ace, having everything that money could buy at his 


The Scullion who Became a Sculptor . 1 99 

command, and daily receiving instruction from the 
best sculptors of Venice. 

But he was not in the least spoiled by this change 
in his fortunes. He remained simple, earnest, and 
unaffected. He worked as hard to acquire knowledge 
and skill in art as he had meant to work to become 
a dexterous stone-cutter. 

Antonio Canova’s career from the day on which he 
moulded the butter into a lion was steadily upward ; 
and when he died, in 1822 , he was not only one of 
the most celebrated sculptors of his time, but one of 
the greatest, indeed, of all time. 


THE BOYHOOD OF WILLIAM CHAMBEES. 


Boys and girls who can buy attractive periodicals 
and books at any bookstore or news-stand, can have 
very little notion of the difficulty that little folk 
had seventy or eighty years ago in getting some- 
thing to read. It was only about fifty years ago, 
indeed, that the first efforts were made to supply 
cheap, instructive, and entertaining literature, and 
one of the men who made those efforts was Mr. 
William Chambers, who, in 1882, when he was 
eighty-two years of age, published a little account 
of his life. What he has to tell of his boyhood 
and youth is very interesting. 

His father was unfortunate in business, and became 
so poor that young Chambers had to begin making 
his own way very early in life. He had little school- 
ing — only six pounds’ (thirty dollars) worth in all, 


The Boyhood of William Chambers . 201 

he tells us — and, as there were no juvenile books or 
periodicals in those days, and no books of any other 
kind, except costly ones, it was hard for him to do 
much in the way of educating himself. But William 
Chambers meant to learn all that he could, and that 
determination counted for a good deal. There was 
a small circulating library in his native town, and 
he began by reading all the books in it, without 
skipping one. Then he got hold of a copy of the 
“ Encyclopaedia Britannica,” which most boys would 
regard as very dry reading. He read it careful- 
ly. When that was done young Chambers was 
really pretty well educated, although he did not 
know it. 

About that time the boy had to go to work for 
his living. He became an apprentice to a bookseller 
in Edinburgh. His wages w T ere only four shillings 
(about a dollar) a week, and on that small sum he 
had to support himself, paying for food, lodging, 
clothes, and everything else, for five years. “ It was 
a hard but somewhat droll scrimmage with semi- 


202 Strange Stories from History . 

starvation,” he says ; for, after paying for his lodgings 
and clothes, he had only about seven cents a day 
with which to buy his food. 

In the summer he jumped out of bed at five o’clock 
every morning, and spent the time before the hour 
for beginning business in reading and making elec- 
trical experiments. He studied French in that way 
too, and on Sundays carried a French Testament to 
church, and read in French what the minister read in 
English. 

Winter came on, and the poor lad was puzzled. It 
was not only cold, but entirely dark at five o’clock 
in the morning during the winter months, and Will- 
iam, who had only seven cents a day to buy food 
with, could not afford either a fire or a candle to read 
by. There was no other time of day, however, that 
he could call his own, and so it seemed that he must 
give up his reading altogether, which was a great 
grief to the ambitious lad. 

Just then a piece of good -luck befell him. He 
happened to know what is called a “sandwich man ” 


The Boyhood of William Chambers. 203 

— that is to say, a man who walks about with signs 
hanging behind and before him. One day this man 
made him a proposition. The sandwich man knew 
a baker who, with his two sons, carried on a small 
business in a cellar. The baker was fond of reading, 
but had no time for it, and as he and his sons had to 
bake their bread early in the morning, he proposed, 
through the sandwich man, to employ William Cham- 
bers as reader. His plan was that Chambers should 
go to the cellar bakery every morning at five o’clock 
and read to the bakers, and for this service he prom- 
ised to give the boy one hot roll each morning. Here 
was double good -fortune. It enabled Chambers to 
go on with his reading by the baker’s light and fire, 
and it secured for him a sufficient breakfast without 
cost. 

He accepted the proposition at once, and for two 
and a half hours every morning he sat on a flour-sack 
in the cellar, and read to the bakers by the light of a 
penny candle stuck in a bottle. 

Out of his small wages it was impossible for the 


204 Strange Stories from History. 

boy to save anything, and so, when the five years of 
his apprenticeship ended, he had only five shillings 
in the world. Yet he determined to begin business 
at once on his own account. Getting credit for ten 
pounds’ worth of books, he opened a little stall, and 
thus began what has since grown to be a great pub- 
lishing business. 

He had a good deal of unoccupied time at his stall, 
and “ in order to pick up a few shillings,” as he says, 
he began to write out neat copies of poems for al- 
bums. Finding sale for these, he determined to en- 
large that part of his business by printing the po- 
ems. For that purpose he bought a small and very 
“ squeaky ” press and a font of worn type which had 
been used for twenty years. He had to teach him- 
self how to set the type, and, as his press would 
print only half a sheet at a time, it was very slow 
work; but he persevered, and gradually built up a 
little printing business in connection with his book- 
selling. After a while he published an edition of 
Burns’s poems, setting the type, printing the pages, 


The Boyhood of William Chambers. 205 

and binding the books with his own hands, and clear- 
ing eight pounds by the work. 

Chambers wrote a good deal at that time, and his 
brother Robert wrote still more, so that they were at 
once authors, printers, publishers, and booksellers, but 
all in a very small way. After ten years of this 
work, William Chambers determined to publish a 
cheap weekly paper, to be filled with entertain- 
ing and instructive matters, designed especially for 
the people who could not afford to buy expensive 
books and periodicals. Robert refused to join in this 
scheme, and so, for a time, the whole work and risk 
fell upon William. His friends all agreed in think- 
ing that ruin would be the result; but William Cham- 
bers thought he knew what the people wanted, and 
hence he went on. 

The result soon justified his expectations. The 
first number was published on the 4th of February, 
1832. Thirty thousand copies were sold in a few 
days, and three weeks later the sale rose to fifty thou- 
sand copies a week. 


HOW A BOY WAS HIBED OUT, AND WHAT 
CAME OF IT. 

When Michael Angelo was twelve years of age, 
although he had had no instruction in art, he did a 
piece of work which greatly pleased the painter Do- 
menico Ghirlandajo. That artist at once declared that 
here was a lad of genius, who must quit his school 
studies and become a painter. 

This was what the little Michael most wished to 
do, but be had no hope that his father would listen 
for a moment to the suggestion. His father, Ludo- 
vico Buonarotti, was a distinguished man in the state, 
and held art and artists in contempt. He had planned 
a great political career for his boy, as the boy knew 
very well. 

Ghirlandajo was enthusiastic, however, and, in com- 


How a Boy was Hired Out , and What Came of It. 207 

pany with the lad, he at once visited Ludovico, and 
asked him to place Michael in his studio. 

Ludovico was very angry, saying that he wished 
his son to become a prominent man in society and 
politics, not a dauber and a mason ; but when he 
found that young Michael was determined to be an 
artist or nothing he gave way, though most ungra- 
ciously. He would not say that he consented to 
place his son with Ghirlandajo ; he would not admit 
that the study of art was study, or the studio of an 
artist anything but a shop. He said to the artist: 
“ I give up my son to you. He shall be your appren- 
tice or your servant, as you please, for three years, and 
you must pay me twenty-four florins for his services.” 

In spite of the insulting words and the insulting 
terms, Michael Angelo consented thus to be hired out 
as a servant to the artist, who should have been paid 
by his father for teaching him. He had to endure 
much, indeed, besides the anger and contempt of his 
father, who forbade him even to visit his house, and 

utterly disowned him. His fellow-pupils were jeal- 
12 


208 Strange Stories from History. 

ous of his ability, and ill-treated him constantly, one 
of them going so far as to break his nose with a blow. 

When Michael Angelo had been with Ghirlandajo 
about two years, he went one day to the Gardens of St. 
Mark, where the Prince Lorenzo de’ Medici — who was 
the foremost patron of art in Florence — had established 
a rich museum of art-works at great expense. One of 
the workmen in the garden gave the boy leave to try 
his hand at copying some of the sculptures there, and 
Michael, who had hitherto studied only painting, was 
glad of a chance to experiment with the chisel, which 
he preferred to the brush. He chose for his model 
an ancient figure of a faun, which was somewhat mu- 
tilated. The mouth, indeed, was entirely broken off, 
but the boy was very self-reliant, and this did not 
trouble him. He worked day after day at the piece, 
creating a mouth for it of his own imagining, with 
the lips parted in laughter and the teeth displayed. 

When he had finished, and was looking at his work, 
a man standing near asked if he might offer a criti- 


cism. 


How a Boy was Hired Out , and What Came of It. 209 

“ Yes,” answered the boy, “ if it is a just one ” 

“ Of that you shall be the judge,” said the man. 

“ Very well. What is it?” 

“ The forehead of your faun is old, but the moutli 
is young. See, it has a full set of perfect teeth. A 
.faun so old as this one is would not have perfect 
teeth.” 

The lad admitted the justice of the criticism, and 
proceeded to remedy the defect by chipping away 
two or three of the teeth, and chiselling the gums so 
as to give them a shrivelled appearance. 

The next morning, when Michael went to remove 
his faun from the garden, it was gone. He searched 
everywhere for it, but without success. Finally, see- 
ing the man who had made the suggestion about the 
teeth, he asked him if he knew where it was. 

“Yes,” replied the man, “and if you will follow 
me I’ll show you where it is.” 

“Will you give it back to me? I made it, and 
have a right to it.” 

“ Oh, if you must have it, you shall.” 


2 1 o Strange Stories from History . 

With that he led the way into the palace of the 
prince, and there, among the most precious works of 
art in the collection, stood the faun. The young 
sculptor cried out in alarm, declaring that the Prince 
Lorenzo would never forgive the introduction of so 
rude a piece of work among his treasures of sculpture. 
To his astonishment the man declared that he was 
himself the Prince Lorenzo de’ Medici, and that he 
set the highest value upon this work. 

“I am your protector and friend,” he added. 
“ Henceforth you shall be counted as my son, for you 
are destined to become one of the great masters of 
art.’* 

This was overwhelming good-fortune. Lorenzo de’ 
Medici was a powerful nobleman, known far and 
wide to be a most expert judge of works of art. His 
approval was in itself fame and fortune. 

Filled with joy, the lad went straightway to his 
father’s house, which he had been forbidden to enter, 
and, forcing his way into Ludovico’s presence, told 
him what had happened. The father refused to be- 


How a Boy was Hired Out , and What Came of It. 211 

lieve the good news until Michael led him into Lo- 
renzo’s presence. 

When the prince, by way of emphasizing his good- 
will, offered Ludovico any post he might choose, he 
asked for a very modest place indeed, saying, with 
bitter contempt, that it was good enough “ for the fa- 
ther of a mason.” 


THE WICKEDEST MAH IN THE WORLD. 

Precisely at what time the faithful and affection- 
ate subjects of his Majesty Ivan IV., Czar of all the 
Russias, conferred upon him his pet name, “ The Ter- 
rible,” history neglects to inform us, but we are left 
in no uncertainty as to the entire appropriateness of 
the title, which is now inseparably linked with his 
baptismal name. He inherited the throne at the age 
of three years, and his early education was carefully 
attended to by his faithful guardians, who snubbed 
and scared him, in the hope that they might so far 
weaken his intellect as to secure a permanent control 
over him, and through him govern Russia as they 
pleased. They made a footstool of him sometimes, 
and a football at others, and, under their system of 
training, the development of those qualities of mind 
and heart for which he is celebrated was remarkably 


The Wickedest Man in the World . 213 

rapid. He was always Ivan the Terrified, and he be- 
came Ivan the Terrible before he was old enough to 
have played a reasonably good game of marbles, or 
to have become tolerably expert in the art of mum- 
bling the peg. Indeed, it seems that the young grand- 
prince was wholly insensible to the joys of these and 
the other excellent sports in which ordinary youths 
delight, and being of an ingenious turn of mind, he 
invented others better suited to his tastes and char- 
acter. One of these pastimes — perhaps the first and 
simplest one devised by the youthful genius — con- 
sisted in the dropping of cats, dogs, and other do- 
mestic animals from the top of the palace to the 
pavement below, and sentimental historians have 
construed these interesting experiments in the law 
of gravitation into acts of wanton cruelty. Another 
of the young czar’s amusements was to turn half- 
famished pet bears loose upon passing pedestrians, 
and it is the part of charity to suppose that his pur- 
pose in this was to study the psychological and 
physiognomical phenomena of fear. A less profitable 


214 Strange Stories from History . 

way he had of accomplishing the same thing was by 
throwing, or, as youthful Americans phrase it, “ shy- 
ing,” stones at passers-by, concealing himself mean- 
while behind a screen. He cultivated his skill in 
horsemanship by riding over elderly people, cripples, 
and children. In short, his boyish sports were all of 
an original and highly interesting sort. 

Up to the age of thirteen Ivan was under the tute- 
lage of a council, of which the Prince Shnisky was 
chief, and it was this prince who domineered over the 
boy and made a footstool and a football of his bodv. 
At that age Ivan asserted his independence in a very 
positive and emphatic way, which even the Prince 
Shnisky could not misapprehend. The young czar 
was out hunting, accompanied by Shnisky and other 
princes and boyards, among whom was Prince Glu- 
isky, a rival of Shnisky’s, who was prejudiced against 
that excellent gentleman. At his suggestion, Ivan 
addressed his guardian Shnisky in language which 
the latter deemed insolent. Shnisky replied angrily, 
and Ivan requested his dogs to remonstrate with the 


The Wickedest Man in the World, 215 

prince, which they did by tearing him limb from 
limb. 

Having thus silenced the dictation of Shnisky, the 
young prince became the ward of the no less excel- 
lent Gluisky, and was carefully taught that the only 
way in which he could effectually assert authority 
was by punishment. It was made clear to his bud- 
ding intellect, too, that the shortest, simplest, and 
altogether the best way to get rid of disagreeable 
persons was to put them to death, and throughout 
his life Ivan never forgot this lesson for a single mo- 
ment. Power, he was told, was worthless unless it 
was used, and the only way in which it could be 
really used was by oppression. For three years no 
pains were spared to teach him this system of ethics 
and politics, and the young prince, in his anxiety to 
perfect himself in the art of governing, diligently 
practised all these precepts. 

When he was seventeen years of age he was for- 
mally crowned czar. The citizens, ignorant of the 
truths of political economy and the principles of 


2 1 6 Strange Stories from History . 

governmental science underlying the young Czar’s 
system, became alarmed, and fired the city one night. 
When Ivan awoke, he was terrified, being of an ab- 
normally nervous temperament, and the apparition 
of a warning monk, together with the influence of 
Anastasia, the young czarina, led the czar to aban- 
don the simple and straightforward methods of gov- 
ernment in which he had been bred, and for thirteen 
years, under the dictation of Alexis Adascheff and 
the monk Sylvester, Ivan devoted himself to the com- 
monplace employments of developing Russia polit- 
ically and socially. He dismissed his ministers and 
put others in their places. He reorganized the army; 
revised the code, in the interest of abstract justice; 
equallized assessments; subdued the Tartars; estab* 
lished forts for the protection of the frontiers; laid 
the foundation for the future greatness of his empire ; 
began the work which was completed so grandly 
under Peter the Great ; introduced printing into 
Russia; added greatly to her possessions; checked 
the abuses of the clergy ; brought artists from west- 


The W ickedest Man in the World, 217 

ern Europe, and in a hundred ways made himself 
famous by doing those things which historians love 
to chronicle. 

Meanwhile, his genius for governing upon the 
Gluiskian system lay dormant. It was not dead, 
but slept, and after its nap of thirteen years it awoke 
one day, refreshed. Anastasia, the beautiful queen 
whose influence had been supreme for so long a time, 
died, and Ivan was free again. He recalled an old 
bishop who had been banished for his crimes, and 
consulted him as to his future course. 

“If you wish to be truly a sovereign,” said this 
eminent prelate, “ never seek a counsellor wiser than 
yourself ; never receive advice from any man. Com- 
mand, but never obey; and you will be a terror to 
the boyards. Remember that he who is permitted to 
begin by advising is certain to end by ruling his sov- 
ereign.” 

Here was advice of a sort suited to Ivan’s taste and 
education, and for reply he kissed the good bishop’s 
hand, saying: 


2i8 Strange Stories from History . 

“My own father could not have spoken more 
wisely.” 

That the czar spoke sincerely, his faithfulness in 
following the bishop’s precepts abundantly attests. 

His ministers and advisers being manifestly wiser 
than he, and therefore not at all the proper kind of 
people to have about, he straightway banished them. 
He then began a diligent search for their partisans, 
some of whom he put to death, condemning others to 
imprisonment and torture. He next turned his atten- 
tion to his own household, which he was resolved 
upon ruling absolutely, at least, if not well. One of 
the princes made himself disagreeable by declining to 
participate freely in the pleasures of the palace, and, 
for the sake of domestic harmony, Ivan had him 
poniarded while he was at his prayers. Another so 
far overstepped the bounds of courtesy and propriety 
as to remonstrate with one of the new favorites upon 
his improper conduct, and Ivan, in order that there 
might be no bickerings and hard feelings in his fam- 
ily, slew the discourteous prince with his own hand. 


The Wickedest Man in the World. 2 1 9 

He was in the habit of carrying an iron rod about 
with him, and he had a playful way of striking his 
friends with it now and then, merely for his amuse- 
ment. His pleasantries of this and like sorts were 
endless. One day Prince Boris, a boyard, came to 
pay his respects to the czar, and as he bowed to the 
ground, according to custom, Ivan, seizing a knife, 
said, “ God bless thee, my dear Boris ; thou deservest 
a proof of my favor,” and with that he kindly cut the 
nobleman’s ear off. 

When Prince Kurbsky, whom he had threatened 
with death, ffed to Poland and wrote him a letter 
thence, telling him pretty plainly what he thought 
of him, the czar playfully struck the bearer of the 
missive with his iron rod, as a preliminary to the 
reading of the letter, and the blood flowed copiously 
from the man’s wounds while Ivan pondered the 
words of his rebellious subject. He then became 
convinced that the boyards generally sympathized 
with Kurbsky, and to teach them better he put a 
good many of them to death by torture, and deprived 


220 Strange Stories from History . 

many others of their estates. His alarm was very 
real, however, for he was a phenomenon of abject 
cowardice. He therefore fled to a fortified place in 
the midst of a dense forest, where he remained a 
month, writing letters to the Russians, telling them 
that he had abdicated and left them to their fate as 
a punishment for their disloyalty and their crimes. 
Singularly enough, his flight terrified the people. He 
had taught them that he was their god as God was 
his, and his flight to Alexandrovsky seemed to them 
a withdrawal of the protection of Providence itself. 
Business was suspended. The courts ceased to sit. 
The country was in an agony of terror. A large 
deputation of boyards and priests journeyed to Alex- 
androvsky, and besought the sovereign to return and 
resume his holy functions as the head of the church, 
that the souls of so many millions might not perish. 
Exacting of clergy and nobles an admission of his 
absolute right to do as he pleased, and a promise that 
they would in no way interfere with or resist his 
authority, he returned to Moscow. Here he sur- 


The Wickedest Man in the World . 


221 


rounded himself with a body-guard of desperadoes, 
one thousand strong at first, and afterwards increased 
to six thousand, whose duty it was to discover the 
czar’s enemies and to sweep them from the face of 
the earth. As emblems of these their functions, each 
member of the guard carried at his saddle-bow a 
dog’s head and a broom. As the punishment of the 
czar’s enemies included the confiscation of their prop- 
erty, a large part of which was given to the guards 
themselves, these were always singularly successful 
in discovering the disaffection of wealthy nobles, 
finding it out oftentimes before the nobles them- 
selves were aware of their own treasonable senti- 
ments. 

Feeling unsafe still, Ivan built for himself a new 
palace, outside the walls of the Kremlin, making it 
an impregnable castle. Then, finding that even this 
did not lull his shaken nerves to rest, he proceeded 
to put danger afar off by dispossessing the twelve 
thousand rich nobles whose estates lay nearest the 
palace, and giving their property to his personal fol- 


222 Strange Stories from History. 

lowers, so that the head which wore the crown might 
lie easy in the conviction that there were no possible 
enemies near on the other side of the impregnable 
walls which shut him in. But even then he could 
not sleep easily, and so he repaired again to his forest 
stronghold at Alexandrovsky* where he surrounded 
himself with guards and ramparts. Here he con- 
verted the palace into a monastery, made himself ab- 
bot, and his rascally followers monks. He rigorously 
enforced monastic observances of the severest sort, 
and no doubt became a saint, in his own estimation. 
He spent most of his time at prayers, allowing him- 
self no recreation except a daily sight of the torture 
of the prisoners who were confined in the dungeons 
of the fortress. His guards were allowed rather a 
larger share of amusement, and they wandered from 
street to street during the day, punishing, with their 
hatchets, such disloyal persons as they encountered. 
They were very moderate in their indulgences, how- 
ever, in imitation of their sovereign, doubtless, and it 
is recorded to their credit, that, at this time, they 


The Wickedest Man in the World. 


223 


rarely killed more than twenty people in one day, 
while sometimes the number was as low as five. 

But a quiet life of this kind could not always con- 
tent the czar. Naturally, he grew tired of individual 
killings, and began to long for some more exciting 
sport. When, one day, a quarrel arose between some 
of his guards and a few of the people of Torjek, Ivan 
saw at a glance that all the inhabitants of Torjek 
were mutinous rebels, and of course it became his 
duty to put them all to death, which he straightway 
did. 

Up to this time the genius of Ivan seems to have 
been cautiously feeling its way, and so the part of his 
history already sketched may be regarded as a mere 
preliminary to his real career. His extraordinary 
capacity for ruling an empire upon the principles 
taught him by the Prince Gluisky was now about to 
show itself in all its greatness. A criminal of Nov- 
gorod, feeling himself aggrieved by the authorities of 
that city, who had incarcerated him for a time, wrote 
a letter offering to place the city under Polish protec- 


224 Strange Stories from History . 

tion. This letter he signed, not with his own name, but 
with that of the archbishop, and, instead of sending 
it to the King of Poland, to whom it was addressed, 
he secreted it in the church of St. Sophia. Then, 
going to Alexandrovsky, he told Ivan that treason 
was contemplated by the Novgorodians, and that the 
treasonable letter would be found behind the statue 
of the Virgin in the church. Ivan sent a messenger 
to find the letter, and upon his return the czar began 
his march upon the doomed city. Happening to pass 
through the town of Khur, on his way to Novgorod, 
he put all its inhabitants to death, with the purpose, 
doubtless, of training his troops in the art of whole- 
sale massacre, before requiring them to practise it 
upon the people of Novgorod. Finding this system 
of drill an agreeable pastime, he repeated it upon his 
arrival at the city of Twer, and then, in order that 
the other towns along his route might have no reason 
to complain of partiality, he bestowed upon all of 
them a like manifestation of his imperial regard. 

It is not my purpose to describe in detail the elab- 


The Wickedest Man in the World. 225 

orate and ingenious cruelty practised in the massacre 
of the Novgorodians. The story is sickening. Ivan 
first heard mass, and then began the butchery, which 
lasted for many days, was conducted with the utmost 
deliberation and most ingenious cruelty, and ended 
in the slaughter of sixty thousand people. Ivan had 
selected certain prominent citizens, to the number of 
several hundred, whom he reserved for public and 
particularly cruel execution at Moscow. Summoning 
the small and wretched remnant of the population to 
his presence, he besought their prayers for the con- 
tinuance and prosperity of his reign, and with gra- 
cious words of farewell took his departure from the 
city. 

The execution in Moscow of the reserved victims 
was a scene too horrible to be described in these 
pages. Indeed, the half of Ivan’s enormities may not 
be told here at all, and even the historians content 
themselves with the barest outlines of many parts of 
his career. He thought himself in some sense a deity, 
and blasphemously asserted that his throne was sur- 


226 Strange Stories from History . 

rounded by archangels precisely as God’s is. Identi- 
fying himself with the Almighty, he claimed exemp- 
tion from the observance of God’s laws, and, in 
defiance of the fundamental principles of the Greek 
Church, of which he was the head, he married seven 
wives. Believing that he might with equal impunity 
insult the moral sense of other nations, he actually 
sought to add England’s queen, Elizabeth, to the list 
of his spouses. And he was so far right in his esti- 
mate of his power to do as he pleased, that the Virgin 
Queen, head of the English Church, while she would 
not herself become one of his wives, consented to as- 
sist him, and selected for his eighth consort Mary 
Hastings, the daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon. 
She came near bringing about a marriage between 
the two, in face of the fact that the two churches of 
which Ivan and she were respectively the heads were 
agreed in condemning polygamy as a heinous crime. 

For one only of all his crimes Ivan showed regret, 
if not remorse. His oldest and favorite son, when 
the city of Pskof was besieged by the Poles, asked 


The Wickedest Man in the World. 227 

that he might be intrusted with the command of a 
body of troops with which to assist the beleaguered 
place. Ivan was so great a coward that he dared not 
trust the affection and loyalty of even his own favorite 
child, and in a fit of mingled fear and rage he beat 
the young man to death with his iron staff, saying, 

“ Rebel, you are leagued with the boyards in a con- 
spiracy to dethrone me.” 

Remorse seized upon him at once, and his sufferings 
and his fears of retribution were terrible. Finally he 
determined to abandon the throne and seek peace in 
a convent, but the infatuated Russians entreated him 
not to desert them. He died at last, in 1580. 

Did Scheherazade herself ever imagine a stranger 
story than this? And yet it is plain history, and is 
only a fragment of the truth. 


A PRINCE WHO WOULD NOT STAY DEAD. 


His name was Dmitri, and he was hereditary Grand- 
Prince of all the Russias, being the son of Ivan the 
Terrible, and only surviving brother of Feodor, the 
childless successor of that blood-thirsty czar. He was 
carefully killed in the presence of witnesses, during his 
boyhood, and duly buried, with honors appropriate 
to his station in life; so that if Dmitri had been an or- 
dinary mortal, or even an ordinary prince, there would 
have been no story of his life to tell, except the brief 
tragedy of his taking off. He was no ordinary prince, 
however, and so the trifling incident of his death dur- 
ing childhood had as little to do with his career as 
had one or two other episodes of a like nature in the 
history of his later life. He was born to rule Russia, 
and was not at all disposed to excuse himself from 
the performance of the duty Providence had thus im- 


A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead . 229 

posed upon him, by pleading the two or three thor- 
ough killings to which he was subjected. The story, 
as preserved ill authentic history, is a very interesting 
one, and may perhaps bear repeating here. The read- 
er may find all the facts in any reputable history of 
Russia, or of the houses of Rurik and Romanoff. 

In his jealousy of the absolute power he wielded, 
Ivan the Terrible had made constant war upon his 
nobility — killing them, or driving them away, and in 
every way possible destroying whatever share of in- 
fluence they possessed in the state. When he died, 
leaving as his successor Feodor, a weak prince, of un- 
certain temper and infirm intellect, the nobility — nat- 
urally enough — hoped to regain their ancient influ- 
ence in the state, and might have accomplished their 
purpose without difficulty if their measures to that 
end had been taken concertedly ; but, jealous as they 
were of the privileges of their class, they were even 
more tenacious of their individual and family preten- 
sions. They quarrelled among themselves, in short, 
and, while they were quarrelling, a bold and ambitious 


230 Strange Stories from History. 

man, Boris Godunof, who happened to be the czar’s 
brother-in-law, conceived the project of becoming 
prime-minister and actual ruler of the empire. In- 
deed, his ambition extended even further than this. 
Not content with governing Russia in the name of 
Feodor, he set covetous eyes upon the purple itself, 
and was resolved to become czar in name as well as 
in fact. But this was a delicate and difficult task, 
and could be accomplished only at great risk and by 
great patience. Boris was a man of undoubted gen- 
ius, extreme shrewdness, unlimited ambition, and re- 
markable personal courage ; and difficult and danger- 
ous as his task was, he seems never to have faltered 
in his purpose from the instant of its conception to 
the time of its execution. 

Knowing the power of money in state affairs, he 
took care to accumulate a vast sum in his own private 
coffers, as a first step. He conciliated the common 
people in a hundred ways — by wise legislation, by the 
reformation of abuses which pressed hardly upon 
them, and sometimes by the oppression of the nobles 


A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead. 2 3 1 

in the interest of the lower classes. He was not long 
in making himself altogether the most popular man 
in Russia. He removed, by death or banishment, 
those whom he could not conciliate, together with all 
other persons whom he thought likely to prove obsta- 
cles in the way of his grand purpose. In short, a 
very brief time sufficed him for the winning of a pop- 
ularity which, in any country but Russia, would have 
been sufficient for his need. But Boris knew his 
Russians well. He knew that loyalty to the line of 
Rurik was the strongest feeling in their breasts, after 
that of devotion to their creed — of which, indeed, it 
formed a chief part. It was their fixed belief in the 
divine right of the legitimate princes of the House of 
Rurik to reign, that had kept them patient, even un- 
der the rigors of Ivan’s rule; and Boris knew well 
enough that no usurper, however strongly intrenched 
in their affections he might be, could hope to win 
those superstitiously loyal people to his support 
against any prince of the right line, however brutal, 
unjust, and despotic that prince might be. *He knew, 


232 Strange Stories from History . 

in brief, that so long as any descendant of Rurik 
should live, no other man could hope to seat himself 
upon the Muscovite throne. Feodor had no children, 
but he had one brother, the lad Dmitri, who would 
be his successor in the natural course of events. His 
existence was sure to prove an effectual bar to all 
Boris’s hopes ; and so it was necessary to get him out 
of the way before the scheme should be ripe for exe- 
cution. To accomplish this, the wily minister sent 
Dmitri and his mother to the distant town of Uglitch, 
and there, by his orders, the young prince was mur- 
dered, in the presence of his nurse and six other peo- 
ple, and buried from his mother’s residence. This 
was in 1591. The lad’s death was announced, of 
course. Indeed, it was known to nearly everybody 
in Uglitch, the tocsin having been sounded, and the 
population having gathered around the murdered 
boy, where they put to death a good many who were 
suspected of complicity with the murderers. But in 
publishing it abroad in Russia, Boris deemed it pru- 
dent to attribute it, some say to a fever, others to an 


A Prince zvho Would Not Stay Dead ’ 233 

accidental fall upon a knife with which the boy had 
been playing; and lest the people of Uglitch should 
embarrass the minister by insisting upon a different 
diagnosis of the boy’s last illness, that prudent offi- 
cial put a great many of them to death, cut the 
tongues out of others’ heads, and banished the rest to 
Siberia — laying the town in ashes. He spared the 
lad’s mother, but shut her up in a convent. 

Dmitri was now out of the way, or, rather, he would 
have been if he had had an ordinary capacity for stay- 
ing comfortably killed ; and Boris redoubled his ef- 
forts to prepare the way for his own elevation to the 
throne, as Feodor’s successor, when that prince should 
chance to let the sceptre fall from his grasp. 

To secure the influence of the Church in his behalf, 
he bought of a Greek bishop the right to appoint the 
successor of the patriarch (a sort of Greek Church 
pope) ; and that office presently becoming vacant, he 
appointed a creature of his own as head of the Church. 
He succeeded in winning the favor of the inferior no- 
bility, who were very numerous, and made himself 
strong in many other ways. 


234 Strange Stories from History . 

Boris was a fellow of infinite good-luck ; and so it 
fell out that, at the precise moment when all his plans 
were complete, the Czar Feodor obligingly died. So 
opportunely did this event happen, that grave histo- 
rians have been inclined to suspect Boris of having 
procured it in some way ; but of this there is no pos- 
itive evidence. 

Feodor dead, there was no heir to the throne. 
With him ended the line of Burik, which alone the 
Bussians recognized as legitimately entitled to rule 
the empire; and now a new czar must be chosen. 
The nobles quarrelled, of course. They agreed in 
thinking that one of their order should be elevated 
to the throne; but they could by no means agree 
which one it should be. Each resented the preten- 
sions of all the others, and it speedily became mani- 
fest that the patriarch’s nomination, upon whomso- 
ever it might fall, would turn the scale and elect a czar. 
The patriarch was Boris’s own creature, appointed for 
the sole purpose of forwarding that minister’s plans ; 
and he promptly nominated Boris to the vacant throne. 


A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead . 235 

The election was a prearranged affair ; and presently 
Boris was waited upon — in the convent to which he 
had retired with the declared purpose of leading a 
monastic life in future — and informed of his selection 
by the people as Czar of all the Russias. He mod- 
estly declined, of course; and, equalty of course, his 
modesty only made the people the more clamorous. 
After some weeks of petty dalliance Boris finally al- 
lowed himself to be persuaded, and was crowned 
czar, in due form, in the year 1598. 

He was not long in discovering that his position 
was insecure, and incapable of being made safe. 
Whatever policy he might adopt — and he was dis- 
posed, it appears, to govern wisely and well — was 
sure to displease some of his subjects; and in the 
hands of a hostile faction, his want of hereditary 
claim upon the throne was a powerful weapon. What 
he had seized by crime he must keep by tyranny and 
violence, and a three years’ famine added greatly to 
his embarrassments. Whatever he did excited dis- 
content ; and to make his wretchedness complete, he 


236 Strange Stories from History . 

fancied himself haunted by the ghost of the murdered 
Dmitri. There were symptoms of mutiny everywhere, 
which daily threatened to culminate in open revolt. 
It needed only a match to fire the mine. 

In 1603, when matters were at their worst, there 
appeared in Poland a young man who claimed to be 
the murdered Dmitri. His story was that, by means 
of an adroit substitution, another boy had been killed 
in his place; that he had escaped; and he claimed 
the throne of the Ruriks. He strongly resembled the 
prince he claimed to be, and his identity seemed to 
be established, also, by other evidence than mere per- 
sonal resemblance. There was no “ strawberry mark 
on his left arm,” but both he and the dead prince, if, 
indeed, they were two distinct persons, had a wart on 
the forehead, and another under the right eye, and in 
both one arm was slightly longer than the other. 
The pretender, or real prince, as the case may be, 
had also a valuable jewel which had belonged to 
Dmitri; and so he was not long in winning credence 
for his story, both in Poland and in Russia. Boris 


A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead , . 237 

gave out that the young man was the monk Otrafief, 
who had appeared in the army as his advocate and 
emissary; and some historians — Karamsin and Bell 
among the number — have accepted this theory ; but 
a careful comparison of dates seems to contradict it. 
Whoever the man was, he was an able and accom- 
plished diplomatist as well as a singularly bold war- 
rior; and he succeeded presently in winning the rec- 
ognition of Sigismund, King of Poland, and putting 
himself at the head of an army with which he in- 
vaded Russia. He had privately abjured the Greek 
faith, and undertaken to convert Russia into a Catho- 
lic power ; and, in addition to the many other favors 
promised the Poles, he had engaged to marry Marina, 
the daughter of a Polish nobleman. 

During the autumn of the year 1604, this new 
Dmitri began his invasion at the head of a small army 
made up of Poles and Don Cossacks. On his march 
his force was swelled by accessions, and a number of 
towns declared in his favor. Boris sent an army four 
times as great as his own, to destroy him ; and battle 


238 Strange Stories from History . 

was joined on the last day of December. Dmitri’s 
case seemed utterly hopeless; but he was both able 
and brave. He fought with the resolution and cour- 
age of a hero, the skill of a consummate tactician, and 
the fury of a demon. And in spite of the terrible 
odds against him, he won a great victory. In a mili- 
tary way, its results were neutralized by the with- 
drawal of his Poles, and by some other circumstances 
which forbade his pushing forward towards the capi- 
tal ; but the moral effect was altogether in his favor. 
The superstitious Russians saw in his marvellous suc- 
cess a miracle, and accepted it as proof positive that 
this was the true prince, to oppose whom was sacri- 
lege. By dint of great energy Boris was able to main- 
tain the war till the time of his own death, which 
happened during the spring of 1605. His son Feo- 
dor was crowned as his successor ; but a few weeks 
later he was deposed and strangled, and the new 
Dmitri came to the throne. 

For a time his wisdom as a statesman promised to 
equal his skill and courage as a soldier, but his man- 


A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead. 239 

ifest preference for Poles to Russians soon created 
jealousy ; and imagining that he could overcome prej- 
udices by violent measures, as easily as he had con- 
quered a throne, he spared no pains to insult the Rus- 
sian national feeling. He appointed only Poles to 
high office, and lavished upon foreigners so much at- 
tention as to breed discontent in his own capital. 
His apostasy from the Greek to the Roman faith, also, 
was suspected, and the clergy became his implacable 
enemies. The disaffection grew daily, and the efforts 
Dmitri made to overawe his enemies only exasperated 
them. Finally, on the occasion of his marriage with 
Marina, the Polish princess — which was celebrated 
with great pomp by a throng of Polish soldiers and 
others, invited to Moscow for the purpose — a mob, 
headed by Shuiski, or Schnisky — for the name is 
spelled in both of these and half a dozen other ways 
— stormed the palace, butchered the Poles, and im- 
paled Dmitri on a spear. To leave no doubt of his 
death this time, they kept his body transfixed with 
the spear, in front of the palace, for three days, that 
14 


240 Strange Stories from History . 

the people might wreak their vengeance upon the 
dead czar by insulting his corpse. 

Schnisky profited by his victory, and while the 
blood of the populace was still hot was chosen czar, 
as successor of the impostor he had overthrown. * His 
popularity was short-lived, however. His fellows 
among the nobles resented his elevation above them- 
selves, and ere long the desire for his removal was as 
unanimous as his election had been. This seemed a 
good time for the doubly dead Dmitri to come to life 
again ; and so it was presently rumored that after all 
he had not been killed; that the corpse the people 
had spat upon and insulted was not his; that he was 
alive, in Poland, and ready to claim his own. This 
report was industriously circulated by the nobles; but 
as the people had not yet forgotten their hatred for 
the usurper, he was permitted to lie down in his grave 
again. 

To prevent his coming to life for a third time, the 
dead czar’s remains were disinterred and burned. 
The ashes were collected and fired from a piece of 


A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead . 241 

artillery, and it was supposed that further resurrec- 
tion on his part was impossible. But, as we have 
seen, Dmitri had a most astonishiug genius for com- 
ing to life after being thoroughly killed ; and pres- 
ently he appeared again in Poland. This time, his- 
tory says, he was either a Russian schoolmaster or a 
Polish Jew; but however that may be, certain it is 
that he so closely resembled the other two Dmitri’s 
in personal appearance, even to the two warts and 
unequally long arms, that he imposed on everybody 
around him with his story. Even the Princess Marina 
accepted him, and actually lived with him as his wife. 

He was able, without much difficulty, to interest 
the King of Poland in his behalf, and to secure a dec- 
laration of war by that potentate against Czar Schnis- 
ky. He invaded Russia, won battles, captured Smo- * 
lensko, invested Moscow, and finally entered the city. 

About this time Dmitri appeared in several other 
places, but only one of him was in Moscow at the 
head of a victorious army ; and in behalf of this par- 
ticular one Schnisky resigned his crown and retired 


242 Strange Stories from History . 

to a monastery, whence he was soon removed to a 
dungeon. 

At this juncture the King of Poland, having plans 
of his own for the union of Russia and his own king- 
dom, withdrew his countenance from Dmitri; and 
that prince retired from the business of governing^ 
and devoted himself for the rest of his life to the less 
honorable, but perhaps equally lucrative, profession 
of highway robbery. He was again killed after 
awhile, this time by a Don Cossack. But even this 
public killing had small effect. A dozen or more 
new Dmitri’s appeared, claiming the throne; and 
some of them, says the historian Bell, “actually 
touched the sceptre for a moment, but only to recoil 
in fear from the dangerous object of their insane am- 
bition.” 

After awhile, having found the task an unprofitable 
one, perhaps, Dmitri seems to have made up his mind 
to stay dead ; but in due course a race of his sons 
sprang up quite as mysteriously, if not quite as per- 
sistently, to pester the Russians, and peace came to 


A Prince who Would Not Stay Dead. 243 

them only through the elevation of the Romanoffs to 
the imperial throne. Connected as they were by ties 
of blood with the race of Rurik, they brought legiti- 
macy to the rescue of a land long torn by faction. 
The loyalty of the people to sovereigns whose right 
to rule was derived from Rurik, gave the dynasty a 
strength sufficient to maintain itself; and after a lit- 
tle while Peter the Great taught his Russians civili- 
zation, and a new era in Russian history was begun. 


THE END. 
















































































































% 









































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THE BOY’S BOOK OF BATTLE LYRICS. By T. Dunn English, LL.D. 
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PEPPER AND SALT; or, Seasoning for Young Folks. Prepared by 
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THOMAS W. KNOX’S WORKS. 8vo, Cloth. Profusely Illustrated. 

THE BOY TRAVELLERS IN SOUTH AMERICA. A Journey through Ecuador, 
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THE STORY OF LIBERTY. THE BOYS OF '76. 

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WHAT MR. DARWIN SAW in his Voyage round the World in the Ship 
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2 


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TOBY TYLER ; OR, TEN WEEKS WITH A CIRCUS. By James Otis. 

MR. STUBBS’S BROTHER. Sequel to “Toby Tyler.” By James Otis. 

TIM AND TIP. By James Otis. 

RAISING THE “PEARL.” By James Otis. 

LEFT BEHIND; OR, TEN DAYS A NEWSBOY. By James Otis. 

THE MORAL PIRATES. By W. L. Alden. 

THE CRUISE OF THE “GHOST.” By W. L. Alden. 

THE CRUISE OF THE CANOE CLUB. By W. L. Alden. 

THE ADVENTURES OF JIMMY BROWN. By W. L. Alden. 

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NAN. By Lucy C. Lillie. 

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WHO WAS PAUL GRAYSON ? By John Habberton. 

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STRANGE STORIES FROM HISTORY, FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. By George 
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GOD AND THE FUTURE LIFE. The Reasonableness of Christianity 
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Interesting Books for Young People. 


3 


THE BALL OF THE VEGETABLES, and Other Stories in Prose and 
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THE HISTORY OF A MOUNTAIN. By £lisee Reclus. Illustrated 
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THE ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG NATURALIST. By Lucien Biart. 
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AN INVOLUNTARY VOYAGE. By Lucien Biart. Illustrated. 12mo, 
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THE BOYHOOD OF MARTIN LUTHER. By Henry Mayhew. Illus- 
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YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. By Henry Mayhew. Illustrated. 
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THE BOYHOOD OF GREAT MEN. By John G. Edgar. Illustrated. 
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4 


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HOW TO GET STRONG, AND HOW TO STAY SO. By William 
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SOUND BODIES FOR OUR BOYS AND GIRLS. By William Blaikie. 
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DOGS AND THEIR DOINGS. By Rev. F. 0. Morris, B.A. Illustrated. 
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TALES FROM THE ODYSSEY FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. By G. M. B. 
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CAST UP BY THE SEA; or, The Adventures of Ned Gray. By Sir 
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THE ADVENTURES OF REUBEN DAVIDGER ; Seventeen Years and 
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WILD SPORTS OF THE WORLD. A Book of Natural History and 
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HOMES WITHOUT HANDS: Being a Description of the Habitations of 
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CAMP LIFE IN THE WOODS; and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap 
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DAVIS’S NIMROD OF THE SEA. Nimrod of the Sea ; or, The Ameri- 
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REID’S ODD PEOPLE. Odd People : being a Popular Description of 
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COUNTRY COUSINS. Short Studies in the Natural History of the 
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FRIENDS WORTH KNOWING. Glimpses of American Natural His- 
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THE COUNTRY OF THE DWARFS. MY APINGI KINGDOM. 

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ROUND THE WORLD; including a Residence in Victoria, and a Jour- 
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Useful Arts. By John Timbs. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1 60. 

OUR CHILDREN’S SONGS. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $1 00. 

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PRAIRIE AND FOREST. A Description of the Game of North Amer- 
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PUSS-CAT MEW, and Other New Fairy Stories for my Children. By 
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FAIRY TALES OF ALL NATIONS. By Edouard Laboulaye. Trans- 
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LAST FAIRY TALES. By Edouard Laboulaye. Translated by Mary 
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HEAT. WATER AND LAND. 

. LIGHT. FORCE. 


FRANCONIA STORIES. 
MALLEVILLE. 
MARY BELL. 
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Illustrated. 16mo, C 
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BEECHNUT. 
STUYVESANT. 
AGNES. 


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HANDIE. THE THREE PINES. 

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UP THE RIVER. 


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THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN. THE WAY TO DO GOOD. 

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MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS. 
QUEEN ELIZABETH. 
CHARLES I. 

CHARLES II. 

HERNANDO CORTEZ. 
HENRY IV. 

LOUIS XIV. 

MARIA ANTOINETTE. 
MADAME ROLAND. 
JOSEPHINE. 

JOSEPH BONAPARTE. 
HORTENSE. 

LOUIS PHILIPPE. 
GENGHIS KHAN. 

KING PHILIP. 

PETER THE GREAT. 


CYRUS THE GREAT. 

DARIUS THE GREAT. 
XERXES. 

ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 
ROMULUS. 

HANNIBAL. 

PYRRHUS. 

JULIUS CAISAR. 
CLEOPATRA. 

NERO. 

ALFRED THE GREAT. 
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 
RICHARD I. 

RICHARD II. 

RICHARD III. 

MARGARET OF ANJOU. 


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CHILD’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated. 
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8 


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SELF-MADE MEN. By Charles C. B. Seymour. Many Portraits. 12mo, 
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C £2*? 


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